
Class £5 1 5 

Book___±L613 



TO 

CALIFORNIA 
AND BACK 




To California 
and Back 




By C. A. HIGGINS 




Illustrations by 

J. T. McCUTCHEON 






PASSENGER DEPARTMENT 
SANTA FE ROUTE 
CHICAGO, i8q7. 



m 






59999 



Copyright, 1897, 

by 

The Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway Company. 





TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



chapter page 

Advertisement 5 

i; Preliminary Stages 7 

II. New Mexico ■ •. .12 

las VEGAS HOT SPRINGS 19 

SANTA FE 22 

PUEBLOS 28 

PENITENTES 34 



III. ARIZONA 



35 



PETRIFIED FORESTS 39 

MOQUIS 43 

CANON DIABLO 46 

FLAGSTAFF 47 

SAN FRANCISCO MOUNTAIN 48 

GRAND CANON OF THE COLORADO .... 52 

CLIFF AND CAVE DWELLINGS 55 

CENTRAL AND SOUTHERN ARIZONA • - . 57 

IV. SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA 62 

OF CLIMATE 67 

SAN DIEGO AND VICINITY 74 

CAPISTRANO 82 

STORY OF THE MISSIONS 84 

LOS ANGELES 92 

PASADENA 96 

MOUNT LOWE 97 

RIVERSIDE AND VICINITY 98 

REDONDO AND SANTA MONICA 100 

SANTA CATALINA ISLAND lor 

SANTA BARBARA 105 

OSTRICH FARMING 108 

WINTER SPORTS 109 

3 




CHAPTER PAGE 

V. Northern California 113 

SAN FRANCISCO 115 

CHINATOWN 119 

SANTA CLARA VALLEY 128 

LAKE TAHOE 133 

VI. Nevada and Utah 135 

OGDEN 137 

SALT LAKE CITY 138 

GREAT SALT LAKE 145 

VII. COLORADO T47 

GLENWOOD SPRINGS 149 

LEADVILLE 155 

BUENA VISTA 157 

CRIPPLE CREEK 159 

MANITOU 163 

ASCENT OF PIKE'S PEAK 168 

COLORADO SPRINGS 171 

DENVER 173 

VIII. Homeward 174 



ADVERTISEMENT. 



The proprietary lines of the Santa Fe Route extend, 
unbroken, through Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, 
southeastern Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and 
California to the Pacific Coast, and compose a con- 
siderable portion of a through return route by way of 
Nevada, Utah and middle Colorado, in the following 
order: 

Between Chicago and Albuquerque, New 
Mexico, 

The Atchison^ Topeka &=" Santa Fe Railway (Santa 
Fe Route). 

Between Albuquerque and Barstow or Mojave, 
California, 

Santa Fe Pacific Railroad {Santa Fe Route). 

Between Barstow and Los Angeles, San Diego, 

AND other points IN CALIFORNIA EAST, SOUTH, 
AND WEST OF LOS ANGELES, 

Sottthern California Railway {Santa Fe Route). 

Between Los Angeles and San Francisco, Cali- 
fornia, AND Between San Francisco and Ogden, 
Utah, 

The line of the Southern Pacific Company. 

Between Ogden and Grand Junction, Colorado, 
Rio Grande Western Railway. 

Between Grand Junction and Pueblo, Colorado 
Springs or Denver, 

Colorado Midland Railroad. 
Denver fir- Rio Grande Railroad. 

Between Denver, Colorado Springs or Pueblo, 
and Chicago. 

The Atchison, Topeka &= Santa Fe Railiva\ (Santa 
Fe Route). 



The circuit of these lines constitutes a comprehensive 
tour of the West, whose merits it is desired to bring 
more particularly to the attention of tourists, and 
whose attractions are the subject of the following 
pages. The necessity of compressing a theme of large 
proportions into a space of reasonable bounds has 
embarrassments which are only in part avoided by 
exclusion of innumerable matters well worthy to be 
included. It would be a simpler task to fill twice as 
many pages. Adequate treatment of a tenth of the 
number of admitted topics would exceed the limits set 
to the present volume. All omissions, therefore, and 
any neglect of particular localities, must be charged to 
a plan which perforce is fragmentary in outline and 
restricted by the very extent of its scope to a brief 
setting forth of only the most contrasting of the more 
notable scenes. 

With this apology to the Great West the book is 
tendered. It is in no sense a guide-book, but explicitly 
an attempt to present the merits of a relatively few 
selected typical features for the consideration of those 
who weigh the high opportunities of travel. 

The illustrations are from original sketches, and 
from photographs chiefly by Curran of Santa Fe, Osbon 
of Flagstaff, Slociun of San Diego, Tabor of San Fran- 
cisco, avidi. Jackson of Denver. 





PRELIMINARY STAGES. 

jHE California trains of tli^ Santa Fe 
Route leave Chicago either in early 
evening, or at a later hour when most 
travelers are ready to retire to the 
seclusion of their berths. In either event the 
earliest stages of the journey offer little of 
interest to the tourist aside from the drain- 
age channel, whose white rock-debris closely 
parallels the way for many miles in almost 
mountainous volume, and affords occasional 
glimpses of the great artificial water-way. By 
day the adjacent country for a few hundred 
miles appears a level or mildly undulating 
region, rich in agricultural products, and re- 
lieved by bits of stream and w^oodland and by 
small villages, wnth here and there a consider- 
able city, such as Joliet, and Streator, and 
Galesburg. It is greater than the whole of 
England and Wales, this state of Illinois, but 
a very few hours' ride is sufficient to bring one 
to its western boundary, the Mississippi River. 
This is crossed at Fort Madison, and the way 
continues across the narrow southeastern corner 
of Iowa into Missouri. While gliding through 
the state last named the traveler awakes to 
7 




p-^ 





sight of a rolling country of distant horizons, 
swelHng here and there to considerable hills. 
checkered with tilled fields and frequent farm- 
houses, divided by small water-courses and 
dense groves of deciduous trees. Not one 
whose scenic features you would travel far to 
see, but gratifying to the eye ; full of gentle 
contrasts and pleasing variety. At the lofty 
Sibley bridge crossing of the Missouri River 
the swift sand-laden volume of this famed 
stream flows far below the level of the eye, and 
there is wide outlook upon either hand. On 
the farther side the way skirts bold bluffs for a 
considerable distance by the side of the broad 
and picturesque river that is reminiscent of the 
days of a greater steamboat commerce. Then 
comes Kansas City, the great commercial gate- 
way of the Missouri. The Kansas border lies 
just beyond, the entrance to that state leading 
by the serpentine course of the river of the 
same name through a wooded landscape to the 
open prairie. 

The billowy surface of Kansas was once the 
bed of an inland sea that deposited enor- 
mous quantities of salt, gypsum and marbles, 
and its rock strata abound in most remarkable 
fossils of colossal animal life — elephants, masto- 
dons, camels, rhinoceroses, gigantic horses, 
sharks, crocodiles, and more ancient aquatic 
monsters of extraordinary proportions, fright- 
ful appearance, and ajDpalling name, whose 
skeletons are preserved in the National 
Museum. Its eastern boimd was long the 
shore of the most stubborn wilderness of our 
possession. The French fur-traders were the 
first to establish footing of civilization in Kan- 



sas, the greater portion of which came to us as 
part of the Louisiana purchase. Sixty-nine 
years ago Fort Leavenworth was created to 
give military protection to the hazardous trade 
with Santa Fe, and the great overland exodus 
of Argonauts to California at the time of the 
gold discovery was by way of that border sta- 
tion. The first general settlement of its east- 
ern part was in the heat of the factional 
excitement that led to the Civil War. It was 
the scene of bloody encounters between free- 
soil and pro-slavery colonists, and of historic 
exploits by John Brown and the guerrilla 
Quantrell. In the space of one generation it 
has been transformed as by a miracle. The 
vast plains whereon the Indian, antelope, and 
buffalo roamed supreme are now counted as 
the second most important agricultural area of 
the LTnion, and its uncultivated tracts sustain 
millions of cattle, mules, and horses. Vigor- 
ous young cities are seen at frequent intervals. 
Topeka, with broad avenues and innumerable 
shade-trees, is one of the prettiest capitals of 
the West. The neighborhood of Newton and 
Burrton is the home of Mennonites, a Russian 
sect that fled to America from the domain of 
the Czar to find relief from oppression. 

At Hutchinson one enters western Kansas, 
and from this point for a long distance the 
road follows the windings of the Arkansas 
River, with only occasional digressions. Dodge 
City, of cowboy fame, and Garden City, the 
scene of Government experiments in agricul- 
ture, are the chief centers of this district. 

Colorado first presents itself as a plateau, 
9 




/g^' 




elevated 4,000 feet above the sea. Soon the 
landscape begins to give hint of the heroic. 
Pike's Peak is clearly distinguishable, and the 
two beautiful Spanish Peaks hover upon the 
horizon and reappear long after the first- 
named has faded from view. Slowly the 
Raton Range gathers significance directly 
ahead, until it becomes a towering wall, at 
whose foot lies the city of Trinidad, beyond 
which begins the final ascent to the first of 
many lofty mountain gateways, the Raton 
Pass. The grade is terrific, and two powerful 
mountain engines are required to haul the 
train at a pace hardly faster than a walk. The 
vicissitudes of the pass are such that the road 
winds tortuously in curves so sharp the wheels 
shriek at the strain. From the rear vestibule 
may be had an endlessly varied and long- 
continued series of mountain-views, for the 
ascent is no mere matter of a moment. There 
are level side canons prettily shaded with 
aspen, long straight slopes covered with pine, 
tumbled waves of rock overgrown with chap- 
arral, huge bare cliffs with perpendicular 
gray or brown faces, and breaks through 
which one may look far out across the lower 
levels to other ranges. A short distance this 
side the summit stands what is left of the old 
toll-house , an abandoned and dismantled adobe 
dwelling, where for many years the veteran 
10 



__^ .^-^y^S^ 





Dick Wooten collected toll from those who 
used the wagon-road through the pass. Both 
ruin and trail are of interest as belonging to 
the ante-railroad period of thrilling adventure, 
for by that road and past the site of the dilapi- 
dated dwelling journeyed every overland stage, 
every caravan, every prairie schooner, every 
emigrant, and every soldier cavalcade bound to 
the southwestern country in early days. 
Beyond this is a wide-sweeping curve from 
whose farther side, looking backward down 
the pass, an inspiring picture is unfolded to 
view for a passing instant — a farewell glimpse 
of the poetic Spanish Peaks at the end of a 
long vista past a ragged foreground of gigantic 
measure. Then the hills crowd and shut off 
the outside world; there is a deep sandstone 
cut, its faces seamed with layers of coal, a 
boundary post marked upon one side Colorado 
and upon the other New Mexico, and instantly 
following that a plunge into a half-mile tunnel 
of midnight blackness, at an elevation of some- 
thing more than 7,600 feet. 

At such a Rubicon the preliminary stages 
may fairly be said to end. 




lif:: 7 \ '^ 






NEW MEXICO. 





LTHOUGH your introduction is by 
way of a long tunnel, followed by a 
winding mountain pass down whose 
steep incline the train rushes as if to 
regain the low level from which the journey 
was begun, you will find New Mexico a terri- 
tory in the sky. If its mountain ranges were 
leveled smoothly over its valleys and plains the 
entire area of more than 120,000 square miles 
would stand higher above the sea than the 
summit of any peak of the Catskills or the 
Adirondacks. Its broad upland plains, that 
stretch to a horizon where wintry peaks tower 
high above the bold salients of gray-mottled 
foothills, themselves lie at an altitude that in 
the Eastern States must be sought among the 
clouds, and at no time will you fall much below 
an elevation of 5,000 feet in traversing the por- 
tion of the territory that lies along the present 
route. 

The landscape is oriental in aspect and 
flushed with color. Nowhere else can you find 
sky of deeper blue, sunlight more dazzling. 



shadows more intense, clouds more luminously 
white, or stars that throb with redder fire. 
Here the pure rarefied air that is associated in 
the mind with arduous mountain climbing is 
the only air known— dry, cool and gently stim- 




ulating. Through it, as through a crystal, the 
rich red of the soil, the green of vegetation, 
and the varied tints of the rocks gleam always 
freshly on the sight. You are borne over 
mountains above forests of pine and fir, with 
transient glimpses of distant prairie; through 
canons where fierce rock walls yield grudging 
passage and massive gray slopes bend down- 
ward from the sky; along level stretches by 
the side of the Great River of the North, whose 
turbid stream is the Nile of the New World; 
past picturesque desert tracts spotted with 
sage, and past mesas, buttes, dead volcanoes 
13 



and lava beds. These last are in a region 
where you will see not only mountain craters, 
with long basaltic slopes that were the ancient 
flow of molten rock, but dikes as well; fissures 
in the level plain through which the black lava 
oozed and ran for many miles. These vast 
rivers of rock, cracked, piled, scattered in 
blocks, and in places overgrown with chapar- 
ral, are full of interest, even to the accustomed 
eye. They wear an appearance of newness, 
moreover, as if the volcanic action were of 
recent date; but there has been found nothing 
in native tradition that has any direct bearing 
upon them. Doubtless they are many centuries 
old. Geologically their age is of course deter- 
minable, but geology deals in rock epochs; it 
talks darkly of millions of years between 
events, and in particulars is careful to avoid 
use of the calendar. It is well to remember 
that the yesterday of creation is singularly bar- 
ren of mankind. We are practically contem- 
poraries of Adam in the history of the cosmos, 
and all of ancient and modern history that lies 
between is a mere evanescent jumble of trivi- 
alities. Dame Nature is a crone, fecund though 
she be, and hugging to her breast the precious 
phial of rejuvenescence. Her face is wrinkled. 
Her back is bent. Innumerable mutations lie 
heavy upon her, briskly though she may plot 
for to-morrow. And nowhere can you find her 
more haggard and gray than here. You feel 
that this place has always worn much the same 
aspect that it wears to-day. Parcel of the 
arid region, it sleeps only for thirst. Slake 
that, and it becomes a garden of paradise as 
14 




by a magic word. The present generation has 
proved it true in a hundred localities, where the 
proximity of rivers or mountain streams has 
made irrigation practicable. The confines 
of the Great American Desert are narrowing 
rapidly. Do but reflect that a quarter-century 
back the journey you now make in perfect com- 
fort was a matter of wild adventure, at cost of 
months of arduous travel and at hazard of life, 
not only because of human foes, but for scarcity 
of food and water. One never appreciates the 
full stride of American progress until he has 
traversed in a Pullman car such a territory as 
this, where Valley of Death and Journey of the 
Dead are names still borne by waterless tracts, 
and justified by bleached bones of cattle and 
lonely mounds of scattered graves. Rescued 
from centuries of horror and planted in the 
front rank of young rising states by the genius 
of our generation. New Mexico is a land of 
broad ranges, where hundreds of thousands of 
sleek cattle and countless flocks of sheep 
browse upon the nutritious grasses; where 
fields of grain wave in the healthful breeze; 
where orchard trees bend under their weight of 
luscious fruits, and where the rocks lay bare 
inexhaustible veins of precious metals. Here 
may be found to-day as profitable large ranches 
as any in the country, and innumerable small 
aggregations of cultivated acres, whose owners 
sit comfortably upon shaded verandas while 
their servants till the field. This is the para- 
dox of a region whose softer scenes will often 
seem to be overborne by bleak mountain and 
desert and lava bed; that if you own ten acres 
15 






of irrigated land here you are that much- 
vaunted but seldom-encountered individual, an 
independent farmer. You may smile in a 
superior way when you hear talk of the profits 
of bank stock. You may look without envy 
upon the man who is said to own a gold mine. 
Scattered by the way are sleepy Mexican vil- 
lages, ancient Indian pueblos, still inhabited, 
and those older abandoned ruins which give to 
the region its peculiar atmosphere of mystery. 
The history of New Mexico formerly began 
with a pretty legend that dated back to a time 
in Spain when a sovereign fighting amid his 
native mountains found himself hemmed in by 
the enemy, and would have perished with all 
his army had not one of his enterprising sol- 
diers discovered an unsuspected pass, the en- 
trance to which he marked with a bleached 
cow's skull that lay convenient to his hand, and 
then returning led a retreat through the pass 
to safety. By order of the grateful king the 
family name of the soldier was thereupon made 
Cabeza de Vaca — cow's head — to celebrate so 
opportune a service. It is to be hoped he got 
a doubloon or two as well, but on that particu- 
lar head tradition is silent. However, among 
the soldier's descendants a talent for discovery 
became a notorious family trait. It amounted 
to a passion with them. You could not get 
into any difficulty but a Cabeza de Vaca could 
find you a way out. Naturally, then, when 
Narvaez set sail from Spain for the Florida 
coast, three and a half centuries ago, he took 
one of that family along for a mascot. The 
expedition came to grief on the Florida reefs, 
i6 





p ^fi^. r^'^'^h. Tsto^ 






but the mascot survived, and with him three 
others who had wisely clung to him when the 
ship went to pieces. Stranded upon an un- 
known coast, menaced by hostile Indians, an 
ocean behind and a wilderness before, this Ca- 
beza de Vaca felt his heart strangely stirred 
within him. He gave no thought to the dangers 
of his situation ; he perceived only that he had 
the opportunity of a lifetime to discover some- 
thing. So, remembering that in far Mexico his 
fellow countrymen were known to dwell, he 
pretended to puJl a long face and told his com- 
panions that to reach the Mexican settlements 
was the only hope of surviving. Then brand- 
ishing his sword in a becoming manner he 
called to them to come on, and led them across 
the unexplored continent of North America, 
in the year of grace 1536, by a route that inci- 
dentally included what is now known as New 
Mexico. Thus, in substance, runs the legend, 
which adds that he had a queer tale to tell, on 
arrival, of Seven Cities of Cibola, and outland- 
ish people of heathen appearance and notions, 
but of temperate and industrious habits withal, 
and presumably rich in treasures 
of silver and gold ; which incited 
Coronado to send out an expedition 
under Marcos de Nizza in 1539, and 
17 





^*^^.f 



a year later himself to take charge of the first 
real invasion, conquering native towns by force 
of arms on his way. 

But in the light of modern historical research 
Cabeza de Vaca's local fame dwindles ; his 
head diminishes. It is denied that he ever 
saw New Mexico, and the title of discoverer is 
awarded to Marcos de Nizza. It does not really 
matter, for in either event the conquest was by 
Coronado, in whose footsteps Spanish coloni- 
zation was first enabled to advance into the ter- 
ritory, which, it should be remembered, was for 
a long time thereafter a vaguely defined area 
of much greater extent than to-day. The friars 
early began their work of founding missions, 
and in the course of time established forty 
churches, attended by some 30,000 native com- 
municants. These natives revolted in 1680, 
and drove the Spaniards out ^f the territory, 
successfully resisting their return for a period 
of twelve years. From the time of their ulti- 
mate subjection (1692) the country grew in pop- 
ulation and commercial importance until, early 
in the present century, its trade with Missouri 
and the East became very valuable. The route 
traversed by pack-mules and prairie schooners 
loaded with merchandise will forever be re- 
membered as the Santa Fe Trail, and was 
almost identical with that followed by Coro- 
nado. It is at present, for the greater part of 
the distance, the route of the Atchison, Topeka 
& Santa Fe Railway between the Missouri 
River and Santa Fe ; and through western 
Kansas, southeastern Colorado, over the Raton 
Pass, and at many points in New Mexico may 





Sf^y-f^ 







easily be seen from the train. The distance 
was 800 miles, and a round trip then consumed 
no days. Merchandise to an enormous value 
was often carried by a single caravan. In spite 
of the protection of a strong military escort 
the trail was almost continuously sodden with 
human blood and marked by hundreds of rude 
graves dug for the mutilated victims of mur- 
derous Apaches and other tribes. Every scene 
recounted by romances of Indian warfare had 
its counterpart along the Santa Fe trail. The 
ambush, the surprise, the massacre, the cap- 
ture, the torture, in terrifying and heart-break- 
ing detail, have been enacted over and over. 
Only with the advent of the railroad did the 
era of peace and security begin. To-day the 
Apache is decimated and harmless, and, with 
the Pueblo Indian and the Mexican, forms a 
romantic background to a thriving Anglo- 
Saxon civilization. 

It is this background that gives New Mexico 
its peculiar charm to the thoughtful tourist; not 
alone its tremendous mountain-ranges, its ex- 
tensive uplands, its fruitful valleys, or its unsur- 
passed equability of climate. Its population 
includes 8,000 Pueblo Indians, 25,000 Navajoes, 
1,300 Apaches, and 100,000 Mexicans. 

LAS VEGAS HOT SPRINGS. 

The little Rio Gallinas issues by a tortuous 
path through rugged tree-fringed canon-walls 
from a spur of the Rockies half a dozen miles 
northwest from the city of Las Vegas. Upon 
its banks, at a point just above where it de- 
bouches upon the vegas, or meadows, numer- 
19 







^.^'i^^'S'- 





ous springs both cold and hot rise to the surface 
in close juxtaposition, their waters charged 
with a variety of chemical ingredients. The 
medicinal virtues of these springs, supple- 
m.ented by the attractiveness of their location 
upon a shoulder of the mountains, and the 
mildness and purity always characteristic of 
New Mexican air, led to the erection of the 
spacious and beautiful Hotel Montezuma, and 
the establishment here of a health resort. It 
is one of the few places in the Middle West 
where a stranger may find contentment day 
after day in comparative idleness. The imme- 
diate scenery has not the prodigiously heroic 
qualities of the more famous Colorado resorts, 
but it is endlessly attractive to the lover of 
nature in her less titanic moods. If you love 
the pine and the fir, here you may have your fill 
of them. If you are fond of a bit of precipitous 
climbing, you may find it here on every hand. 
If you are for quiet shaded nooks, or lofty 
pulpit perches that overhang a pretty clattering 
stream in deep solitudes, here they abound. 
And from the adjacent hilltops are to be had 
wide-sweeping views eastward over the vegas 
and westward over rocky folds to where the 
blue masses of the mountain chain are piled 
against the sky. There are wagon-roads wind- 
ing over hill and through glen, past the verge 
of canons and penetrating deep into the forest, 
and narrower branching trails for the pedestrian 
and the horseman. Who fails to explore these 
intimately will miss the full charm of Las Vegas 
Hot Springs. It is a place in which to be rest- 
fully happy. 




'% 



1 i^j«Mo^ >'- 



1 J' 







\ s 



Every known form of bath is administered in 
the bath house at the Springs, a resident physi- 
cian is in charge, and the equable air and ahnost 
unbroken sunlight of the long peaceful day are 
themselves a remedy for physical ills that are 
incurable in the harsh climes of the North and 
East. It is not, as might be inferred, a place 
of distressful heat, but a land of soft golden 
light whose parallel is the most perfect day of 
a New England spring. And although the 
environment of the Montezuma represents the 
climax of natural remedial conditions, joined to 
comfort and luxury, the whole territory is su- 
premely healthful, containing numerous special 
localities that differ in elevation and in conse- 
quent adaptation to the requirements of the 
complications of disease. Raton, Springer, Las 
Vegas proper, Santa Fe, and Albuquerque, all 
are health resorts of high merit along the pres- 
ent route through New Mexico. South of 
Albuquerque are several admirable resorts of 
lower altitude, such as Las Cruces, in the 
Mesilla Valley, Hudson Hot Springs, in the 
Mimbres Valley, and El Paso, in Texas. 



SANTA FE. 

In 1605 the Spaniards founded this city under 
the name La Chidad Real de la Sanla Fc dc 
San Francisco (the True City of the Holy Faith 
of St. Francis), which, like many another pon- 
derous Spanish title, has been reduced to lower 
terms in the lapse of time. 
^^^'i-vj/'^ The extraordinary interest of 
'-^ii^ ' \ii 52^^^'^ ^^^ early days is 

\^ : ^M^T^^^^^S^^^^^^' ^^ S^ ^®P^ ^^^^'^ ^y monu- 
^1 




ail I 



ments which the kindly elements protect from 
the accustomed ravages of the centuries. The 
territorial governor to-day receives his guests 
in the same room that served visitors in the time 
of the first viceroy. Eighteen American and 
seventy-six Mexican and Spanish rulers have 
successively occupied the palace. It has sur- 
vived all those strange modulations by which a 
Spanish province has become a territory of the 
Union bordering on statehood. The story of 
the palace stretches back into real antiquity, to 
a time when the Inquisition had powers, when 
zealous friars of the Order of St. Francis ex- 
horted throngs of dimly comprehending hea- 
then, and when the mailed warriors of Coronado 
told marvelous uncontradicted tales of ogres 
that were believed to dwell in the surrounding 
wilderness. Beneath its roof are garnered 
priceless treasures of that ancient time, which 
the curious visitor may behold. There are 
faded pictures of saints painted upon puma- 
skins; figures laboriously wrought in wood to 
shadow forth the Nazarene; votive offerings of 
silver, in the likeness of legs, arms and hands, 
brought to the altar of Our Lady by those who 
had been healed of wounds or disease; rude 
stone gods of the heathen, and domestic uten- 
sils and implements of war. There, too, may 
be seen ancient maps of the New World, let- 
tered in Latin and in French, on which Cali- 
fornia appears as an island of the Pacific, and 
the country at large is confidently displayed 
with grotesque inaccuracy. 

, Nearly a mile distant from 

the palace, on an eminence over- 

^ \ ^ 






-M^i 





^^^k 



'>-^»- 



looking the town, stands the old Chapel Ro- 
sario, now neighbored by the Ramona school 
for Apache children. In 1692 Diego de Vargas, 
marching up from the south, stood upon 
that hill with his little army of 200 men and 
looked over into the city from which his 
countrymen had been driven with slaughter 
a dozen years before. There he knelt and 
vowed to build upon the spot a chapel for the 
glorification of Our Lady of the Rosary, pro- 
vided she would fight upon his side that day. 
The town was carried by assault after a desper- 
ate contest of eleven hours' duration, and the 
chapel was built. It savors quaintly to us of a 
less poetic age that those royal old adventurers 
should have thought themselves hand and glove 
with the celestial powers; but they certainly 
made acknowledgment of services supposed to 
have been rendered, upon occasion. 

There are other places of antiquarian inter- 
est, where are stored Spanish archives cover- 
ing two and a quarter centuries, and numerous 
paintings and carvings of great age ; the 
26 




■^^•^ 



Church of Our Lady of Light, the Cathedral 
of San Francisco, and finally the Church of 
San Miguel and the Old House, isolated from 
everything that is in touch with our century by 
their location in the heart of a decrepit old 
Mexican village. Here, at last, is the real 
Santa Fe of the traveler's anticipation; a strag- 
gling aggregation of low adobe huts, divided 
by narrow winding lanes, where in the sharply 
defined shadows leathern-faced old men and 
women sit in vacuous idleness and burros 
loaded with firewood or garden truck pass to 
and fro ; and in small groups of chattering 
women one catches an occasional glimpse of 
bright interrogating eyes and a saucy hand- 
some face, in spite of the closely drawn tapelo. 
If now some sturdy figure in clanking armor 
should obligingly pass along, you would have 
an exact picture of the place as it appeared 
two and a half centuries ago. Nothing but 
that figure has departed from the scene, and 
substantially nothing new has entered in. It 
does not change. The hurrying activities and 
transitions of the outer w^orld, from which it is 
separated by only a narrow arroyo, count for 
nothing here. One questions if the outline of 
a shadow has altered for generations. The 
Old House, where Coronado is said to have 
lodged in 1540, and the Church of San Miguel, 
which was sacked in 1680 and rehabilitated in 
1 710, are not distinguishable from their sur- 
roundings by any air of superior age. All is 
old, a petrifaction of medieval human life done 
in adobe. 

27 






More than a score of these many-storied, 
many-chambered communal homes are scat- 
tered over the territory, three of the most 
important of which may be mentioned as lying 
adjacent to the present route : Isleta, Laguna, 
and Acoma. Isleta and Laguna are within a 
stone's throw of the railroad, ten miles and 
sixty-six miles respectively beyond Albuquer- 
que, and Acoma is reached from either Laguna 
or Cubero by a drive of a dozen miles. The 
aboriginal inhabitants of the Pueblos, an intel- 
ligent, complex, industrious and independent 
race, are anomalous among North American 
natives. They are housed to-day in the self- 
same structures in which their forebears were 
discovered, and in three and a half centuries 
of contact with Europeans their manner of life 
has not materially changed. The Indian tribes 
that roamed over mountain and plain have 
become wards of the Government, debased 
and denuded of whatever of dignity they once 
possessed, ascribe what cause you will for their 
present condition. But the Pueblo Indian has 
absolutely maintained the integrity of his in- 
dividuality, self-respecting and self-sufficient. 
He accepted the form of religion professed by 
his Spanish conquerors, but without abandon- 
ing his own ; and that is practically the only 
concession his persistent conservatism has ever 
made to external influence. 

Laborious efforts have been made to pen- 
etrate the reserve with which the involved 
inner life of this strange child of the desert is 
28 




guarded, but it lies like a vast dark continent 
behind a dimly visible shore, and he dwells 
within the shadowy rim of a night that yields 
no ray to tell of his origin. He is a true pagan , 




swathed in seemingly dense clouds of super- 
stition, rich in fanciful legend and profoundly 
ceremonious in religion. His gods are innu- 
merable. Not even the ancient Greeks pos- 
sessed a more populous Olympus. On that 
austere yet familiar height gods of peace and 
of war, of the chase, of bountiful harvest and 
of famine, of sun and rain and snow, elbow 
a thousand others for standing-room. The 
trail of the serpent has crossed his history, too, 
and he frets his pottery with an imitation of 
its scales, and gives the rattlesnake a prom- 
inent place among his deities. Unmistakably 
a pagan, yet the purity and well-being of his 
communities will bear favorable comparison 
with those of the enlightened world. He is 
brave, honest and enterprising within the 
fixed limits of his little sphere, his wife is vir- 
tuous, his children are docile. And were the 
30 



whole earth swept bare of every living thing, 
save for a few leagues surrounding his tribal 
home, his life would show no manner of dis- 
turbance. Possibly he might not immediately 
learn of so unimportant an occurrence. He 
would still alternately labor and relax in fes- 
tive games, still reverence his gods and rear 
his children to a life of industry and content, 
so anomalous is he, so firmly established in an 
absolute independence. 

Pueblo architecture possesses nothing of the 
elaborate ornamentation found in Aztec ruins. 
The house is severely plain. It is sometimes 
seven stories in height and contains over a 
thousand rooms. In some instances it is built 
of adobe — blocks of mud mixed with straw 
and dried in the sun — and in others of stone 
covered with mud cement. The entrance is by 
means of a ladder, and when that is pulled up 
the latch-string is considered withdrawn. 

The pueblo of pueblos is Acoma, a city 
without a peer. It is built upon the summit of 
a table-rock with overhanging eroded sides, 350 
feet above the plain, which is 7,000 feet above 
the sea. Acoma pueblo is 1,000 feet in length 
and 40 feet high, and there is besides a church 
of enormous proportions. Formerly it was 
reached only by a precipitous stairway in the 
rock, up which the inhabitants carried upon 
their backs every particle of the materials of 
which the village is constructed; but easier 
pathways now exist. The graveyard con- 
31 




'^ir 




^■'Mii'-f*'^''' ' 



sumed forty years in building, by reason of the 
necessity of bringing earth from the plain 
below; and the church must have cost the 
labor of many generations, for its walls are 60 
feet high and 10 feet thick, and it has timbers 
40 feet long and 14 inches square. 

The Acomas welcomed the soldiers of Coro- 
nado with deference, ascribing to them celes- 
tial origin. Subsequently, upon learning the dis- 
tinctly human character of the Spaniards, they 
professed allegiance, but afterward wantonly 
slew a dozen of Zaldivar's men. By way of re- 
prisal Zaldivar headed three-score soldiers and 
undertook to carry the sky-citadel by assault. 
The incident has no parallel in American history 
short of the memorable and similar exploit of 
Cortez on the great Aztec Pyramid. After a 
three days' hand-to-hand struggle the Span- 
iards stood victors upon that seemingly im- 
pregnable fortress, and received the submission 
of the Queres, who for three-quarters of a cen- 
tury thereafter remained tractable. In that 
interval the priest came to Acoma and held 
footing for fifty years, until the bloody upris- 
ing of 16S0 occurred, in which priest, soldier, 
and settler were massacred or driven from the 
land, and every vestige of their occupation 
Avas extirpated. After the resubjection of the 
natives by Diego de Vargas the present church 
32 







was constructed, and the Pueblos have not 
since rebelled against the contiguity of the 
white man. 

Anciently, according to an imputed tradition, 
the original pueblo of Acoma stood upon the 
crest of the Haunted Mesa, three miles away, but 
its only approach was one day destroyed by the 
falling of a cliff, and a few unhappy women and 
children who chanced to be the only occupants — 
the remainder of the population being at work 
in the fields below — died of starvation, in view 
of the homeless hundreds of their people who 
for many days surrounded the inaccessible mesa 
with upturned agonized faces. In July, 1897, 
Professor William Libbey, of Princeton Univer- 
sity, actuated by the desire to scale a rock 
declared to be unscalable, and not unwilling to 
recover for the scientific world the vast archgeo- 
logical treasure which had rested undisturbed 
upon its summit for uncounted centuries — if 
the legend should prove authentic — laid siege 
to the Mesa Eticantada with a cannon and 
several miles of assorted ropes, supplemented 
by pulleys and a boatswain's cnair. After 
two or three days of preliminary work Mr. 
Libbey and his companion made their way to 
the top, and upon a thorough inspection found 
nothing to indicate that it had ever been inhab- 
ited or visited before by man. So another 
poetic illusion was destroyed; but the incident 
is worth recording as a pretty bit of climbing. 
At one end of the mesa, 350 feet above the 
observer, a small ladder is now to be seen. 
Mr. Libbey placed it there. Whoever will 
may take it down, 

33 * 





PENITENTES. 

All the numerous Mexican 
communities in the territory 
contain representatives of this 
order, which is peculiar by reason of the self- 
flagellations inflicted by its members in their 
excess of pietistic zeal. Unlike their ilk of In- 
dia, they do not practice self-torture for long 
periods, but only during a certain period in each 
year. Then, stripped to the waist, these poor 
zealots go chanting a dolorous strain and beat- 
ing themselves unsparingly upon the back with 
the sharp-spined cactus or soap-weed, until 
they are a revolting sight to look upon. Often 
they sink from the exhaustion attendant upon 
long-sustained suffering and loss of blood. 
The extreme ordeal of crucifixion was not in- 
frequently practiced in former years, and it is 
said some are now alive who bear the mark of 
the spike in their palms. Among the peniten- 
tial ceremonies is the bearing a huge cross of 
heavy timber for long distances, amid the ex- 
horting cries of onlookers. The one who is 
adjudged to have punished himself most 
34 




severely is chosen chief of the performance fot 
the following year, and the honor does not 
want for aspirants. 

Attempts have been made to abolish this 
annual demonstration, but without avail. 




III. 
ARIZONA. 

HE portion to be traversed is a land of 
' prodigious mountain terraces, exten- 



sive plateaus, profound canons, and 
flat, arid plains, dotted with gardens 
of fruits and flowers, patched wnth vast tracts 
of pine timber, and veined with precious stones 
and metals, alternating with desolate beds of 
lava, bald mountainous cones of black and red 
volcanic cinder, grass-carpeted parks, uncouth 
vegetable growths of the desert, and bleak 
rock spires, above all which white peaks gleam 
radiantly in almost perpetual sunlight. The 
long-time residents of this region are unable to 
shake o& its charm, even when no longer com- 
pelled by any other consideration to remain. 
Its frequent wide stretches of rugged horizon 
35 




exert a fascination no less powerful than that 
of arduous mountain fastnesses or the secret 
shadows of the dense forest. There is the 
same dignity of Nature, the same mystery, 
potent even upon those who can least define its 
thrall. Miners confess to it, and herdsmen. 
To the traveler it will appear a novel environ- 
ment for contemporaneous American life, this 




land of sage and mesquite, of frowning vol- 
canic piles, shadowed canons, lofty mesas and 
painted buttes. It seems fitter for some Cyclo- 
pean race; for the pterodactyl and the behe- 
moth. Its cliffs are flung in broad, sinuous 
lines that approach and recede from the way, 
their contour incessantly shifting in the simili- 
tude of caverns, corridors, pyramids, monu- 
ments, and a thousand other forms so full of 
structural idea they seem to be the unfinished 
work of some giant architect who had planned 
more than he could execute. 
36 



The altitude is practically the same as that of 
the route through New Mexico, undulating 
between 5,000 and 7,000 feet above sea-level, 
until on the western border the high plateaus 
break rapidly down to an elevation of less than 
500 feet at the valley of a broad and capricious 
stream that flows through alternate stretches of 
rich alluvial meadow and barren rock-spires — 
obelisks rising against the sky. This stream is 
the Colorado River, wayward, strenuous, and 
possessed of creative imagination and terrific 
energies when the mood is on. It chiseled the 
Grand Canon, far to the north and east, and 
now complacently saunters oceanward. Despite 
its quiet air, not long ago, it conceived the 
whim to make a Sal ton Sea far to the south, 
and the affair was a national sensation for 
many months. The great cantilever bridge that 
spans it here was made necessar}^ by the restless 
spirit of the intractable stream. Only a few 
years ago the crossing was by means of a huge 
pile bridge several miles toward the north; but 
the river shifted its channel so frequently it was 
thought desirable to build a new bridge down 
here among the enduring obelisks, which are 
known as The Needles. It is a picturesque 
spot, full of color, and the air has a pure trans- 
parency that lends depth and distance to the 
view, such as the bird knows in its flight. The 
Needles form the head of the gorgeously beaur 
tiful Mojave Canon, hidden from view. The 
Colorado is an inveterate lover of a chaotic chan- 
nel. It is its genius to create works of art on 
a scale to awe the spirit 
of cataclysm itself. It 
37 






is a true Hellespont, issuing from Cimmerian 
gloom to loiter among sunny fields, which it 
periodically waters with a fertilizing flood; and 
while you follow its gentle sweep it breaks into 
sudden uproar and hews a further path of des- 
olation and sublimity. One who does not know 
the canons of the Colorado has never experi- 
enced the full exaltation of those impersonal 
eniotions to which the Arts are addressed. 
There only are audience-halls fit for the trage- 
dies of -il^schylus, for Dante and the Sagas. 

The known history of Arizona begins with 
the same Mark of Nice whom we have already 
accredited as the discoverer of New Mexico, of 
which this territory was long a part; and here, 
as well, he was followed by Coronado and the 
missionaries. This is the true home of the 
Apache, whose unsparing warfare repeatedly 
destroyed the work of early Spanish civiliza- 
tion and won the land back for a time to 
heathenesse. Its complete acquisition by the 
United States dates from 1853, and in the early 
days of the Civil War it was again devastated. 
After its reoccupation by California troops in 
1862, settlers began to penetrate its northern 
portion. Nearly twenty years later the first 
railroad spanned its boundaries, and then 
finally it became a tenable home for the Saxon, 
although the well-remembered outbreak of 
Geronimo occurred only ten years ago. To-day 
the war-thirsty Apaches are widely scattered 
among distant reservations, and wnth them has 
departed the last existing element of disturb- 
ance. But Arizona will never lose its peculiar 
atmosphere of extreme antiquity, for in addi- 
38 



tion to those overwhelming chasms that have 
lain unchanged since the infancy of the world, 
it contains within its borders the ruins of once 
populous cities, maintained by an enormous 
irrigation system which our modern science has 
not yet outdone; whose history was not written 
upon any lasting scroll; whose peoples are 
classed among the undecipherable antiquities of 
our continent, their deeds unsung, their heroes 
unchronicled and unknown. 

Yet, if you have a chord for the heroic, hardly 
shall you find another land so invigorating as 
this of Arizona. It stiffens the mental fiber 
like a whiff of the north wind. It stirs in the 
blood dim echoes of days when achievement 
lay in the might of the individual arm ; when 
sword met targe in exhilarating struggles for 
supremacy. The super-refinement of cities 
dissipates here. There is a tonic breeze that 
blows toward simple relations and a lusty self- 
hood. 

PETRIFIED FORESTS. 

From remotest epochs earth has striven 
against the encroaching slime of seas in a 
wasting struggle to free her face to air. Those 
who are learned may tell you where she is left 
most deeply scarred by the conflict, but in this 
region where her triumph, if barren, is com- 
plete, and the last straggling columns of her 
routed foe are sourly retreating ocean ward, at 
least her wounds are bare, and with them 
many a strange record which she thought to 
lock forever in her bosom. Long ere Noah fell 
39 



"^^...^.,. 




M^i 








adrift with the heterogeneous company of the 
ark, or Adam was, perhaps even before the 
ancestral ape first stood erect in the posture of 
men that were to be, forests were growing in 
Arizona, just as in some parts they grow to- 
day. And it befell in the course of time that 
they lay prostrate and over them swept the 
waters of an inland sea. Eons passed, and 
sands like snowflakes buried them so deep the 
plesiosaurus never suspected their grave be- 
neath him as he basked his monstrous length 
in the tropic waters and hungrily watched the 
pterodactyl lolling in the palm-shade on the 
rim. Then the sea vanished, the uncouth den- 
izens of its deeps and shores became extinct, 
and craters belched forth volcanic spume to 
spread a further mantle of oblivion over the 
past. Yet somewhere the chain of life re- 
mained unbroken, and as fast as there came 
dust for worm to burrow in, mould for seed to 
sprout in, and leaf for insect to feed on, life 
crept back in multiplying forms, only to retreat 
again before the surge of elemental strife after 
40 



a century or after a thousand years. The pre- 
cise sequence of events as here sketched must 
not be too critically scanned. The aim is to sug- 
gest an approximate notion, to those who pos- 
sess no better, of some prodigious happenings 
which have a bearing on our immediate theme. 
If still one chance to lack a working idea, let 
him remember that the solid surface of earth is 
ceaselessly changing contour, that it actually 
billows like the ocean sea. It merely moves 
more slowly, for if the gradual upheavals and 
depressions of the earth's crust throughout mil- 
lions of years were performed within the brief 
span of an hour, you would have the wildest 
conceivable spectacle of cold rock-strata become 
as fluctuant as water and leaping and falling 
in waves whose crests towered miles in air, 
and whose lengths were measurable by half a 
continent. This region for hundreds of square 
miles was once sunk so low the ocean over- 
flowed it ; then upheaved so high the brine 
could find no footing. Again a partial depres- 
sion made it a vast repository of rivers that 
drained the higher levels, which in time was 
expelled by a further upheaval. During the 
periods of subsidence the incoming waters de- 
posited sand and silt, which time hardened to 
rock. But in periods of upheaval the process 
was reversed and the outgoing waters gnawed 
the mass and labored constantly to bear it 
away. 

So, to return to our long-buried forest, some 
10,000 feet of rock was deposited over it, 
and subsequently eroded clean away. And 
41 



x^Q?^^. 






when these ancient logs were uncovered, and, 
like so many Van Winkles, they awoke — but 
from a sleep many thousand times longer — to 
the sight of a world that had forgotten them, lo 
the sybaritic chemistry of nature had trans- 
formed them every one into chalcedony, topaz, 
rg-\ onyx, carnelian, agate and amethyst. Thou- 
^1 sands of acres are thickly strewn with trunks 
and segments of trunks, and covered with chip- 
like fragments. There are several separated 
tracts, any one of which will seem to the aston- 
ished beholder an inexhaustible store of gems, 
measurable by no smaller phrase than millions 
of tons ; a profusion of splinters, limbs, and 
logs, every fragment of which as it lies would 
adorn the collector's cabinet, and, polished by 
the lapidary, might embellish a crown. Some 
of these prostrate trees of stone are over loo 
feet in length and 7 or 8 feet in diameter, 
although they are most frequently broken into 
sections by transverse fracture. One of these 
huge trunks, its integrity still spared by time, 
spans a canon 50 feet wide — a bridge of jasper 
and agate overhanging a tree-fringed pool — 
strange embodiment of a seer's rhapsody, 
squandered upon a desert far from the habi- 
tation of men. 

The largest and best known of the petri- 
fied forests lie from twenty to thirty 
miles distant from Holbrook, where large 
parties will find the most satisfactory avail- 
able hotel accommodations, and abundant 
facilities for local transportation. Individual 
visitors, or small parties, will minimize time, 
cost and fatigue by leaving the train at Ada- 
42 



mana, a little station between Billings and 
Carrizo. Mr. Adam Hanna, a companionable 
Scotchman, lives with his family within call, 
and will provide wholesome ranch fare for a 
somewhat limited number of visitors, and 
convey them to the nearest of the forests, only 
seven miles away. This particular tract em- 
braces several hundred acres, includes the 
natural log-bridge above mentioned, and will 
amply reward a visit. 

MOQUIS. 

The reservation containing the Moqui vil- 
lages — fair white castles cresting the cliffs of 
a desert waste — lies to the north of Winslow, 
farther away than the average tourist may 
care to journey; but the Moquis themselves 
frequently may be seen about the station 
named. Not uncomely, clad in picturesque 
costume, and representative of the ever-inter- 
esting Pueblo life, they merit more than pass- 
ing mention. With them alone survives the 
revolting but fascinating spectacle of the 
snake dance, that once was common to all the 
Pueblo peoples. Upon the question of the vir- 
ulency of the rattlesnake's bite opinions are 
diverse. There are those who claim that there 
is positively no antidote for the venom of a 
healthy full-grown reptile of that species, yet 
old ranchmen will tell you stories of prompt 
recovery from snake-bite by the virtue of a 
mysterious weed plucked by Indian or Mexi- 
can; and plain whisky has its stanch advocates 
in this as in many another vicissitude of 
human life. It is, however, certain that the 
43 





^///^/^/^'^' 



MOQUI HAIRDRESSER. 
44 



bite of crotalus is often fatal, and is univer- 
sally dreaded, except by the Moquis in the 
season of their dance, at which time they 
handle their reptile deity with the most auda- 
cious familiarity and without serious danger. 
The secret of the mysterious antidote used by 
them is supposed to be known to only three of 
the tribe, namely, the high priest, the neophyte 
who is in training to inherit that office, and 
the eldest woman. In the event of the death 
of any one of these three it is imparted to a suc- 
cessor, and under any other circumstances its 
betrayal is punishable by death. Every year, 



several days before the great day of the cere- 
mony, the intending participants enter upon a 
strict fast, which is not broken until the dance 
has been concluded. In the intervening period 
the secret decoction is freely administered by 
the venerable medicine-man, and the dancers 
employ their leisure in capturing rattlesnakes 
and other serpents of the desert. Several 
hundred of the hideous reptiles are' collected 
alive and imprisoned in a little corral. Upon 
the morning of the fourth day, at the appointed 
45 




^»/5f- 





hour, the dancers boldly enter the corral, and 
seizing a snake in each hand rush out to join in 
the mystic savage rite . Unimpeachable author- 
ity vouches for the statement that the reptiles 
are not unfanged or in anywise deprived of the 
exercise of their deadly function. On the con- 
trary, the dancers are sometimes bitten as they 
twine the reptiles around their necks and arms, 
or hold them in their mouths by the middle 
and swing them to and fro. But the potency 
of the antidote is such that only a slight irrita- 
tion or small local inflammation ensues, and 
the Moquis seem to give no more thought to 
the venomous caresses of their squirming cap- 
tives than they would give to the sting of a 
gnat. At the conclusion of the dance the 
snakes are reverently restored to freedom, hav- 
ing been prevailed upon to use their influence 
with the beneficent powers for the space of a 
whole year in behalf of their dusky worshipers. 

CA5J0N DIABLO. 

This is a profound gash in the plateau, some 
225 feet deep, 550 feet wide and many miles 
long. It has the appearance of a volcanic rent 
in the earth's crust, wedge-shaped, and terraced 
in bare dun rock down to the thread of a stream 
46 













that trickles through the notch. It is one of 
those inconsequent things which Arizona is 
fond of displaying. For many miles you are 
bowled over a perfectly level plain, and without 
any preparation whatever, save only to slacken 
its pace, the train crosses the chasm by a 
spider-web bridge and then speeds again over 
the self -same placid expanse. In the darkness 
of night one m' _jht unsuspectingly step off into 
its void, it is so entirely unlooked-for. Yet, re- 
markable as is the Canon Diablo, in comparison 
with those grand gorges hereafter to be men- 
tioned, it is worth little better than an idle 
glance through the car window in passing. 




FLAGSTAFF. 

Gateway to most remarkable ancient ruins, 
to one of the most practicable and delightful of 
our great mountains, and to the Grand Cailon 
of the Colorado River, Flagstaff is itself pic- 
torial in character and rich in interest. It 
stands upon a clearing in an extensive pine 
forest that here covers the plateau and clothes 
the mountains nearly to their peaks; although 
the word park better describes this sunlit, grass- 
carpeted expanse of widely set towering pines, 
where cattle graze and the horseman may 
gallop at will. Couched at the foot of a noble 
mountain that doffs its cap of snow for only a 
few weeks of the year, and environed by vast 
resources of material wealth in addition to its 
aggregation of spectacular and archaeological 
features, its fame has already spread widely 
over the world, and will increase with time. 
Space can here be given to only its three most 
47 





ff^'uFti'illlliji 111 '7' J 



J 



'^a. 
''<. 




celebrated possessions, but the visitor can not 
hope to exhaust its attractions. There are wood- 
land retreats where sculptured rocks tower many- 
hundred feet above the still surface of pools; 
box canons where myriads of trout leap from 
the waters of the stream that flows through 
depths of shadow; thickets where the deer 
browses; plains where the antelope courses, 
and rocky slopes where the bij. horn clambers 
and the mountain-lion dozes in the sun. 

The pellucid and quiet atmosphere of this 
region led to the erection at Flagstaff of the 
renowned Lowell Observatory, which is plainly 
visible from the train. Astronomical science 
has been enriched by several valuable discov- 
eries recently made here. 

SAN FRANCISCO MOUNTAIN. 

Here, as in many other parts of the West, the 
actual height of a mountain is greater than is 
apparent to the eye. The ascent begins at a 
point considerably above where the Eastern 
mountain climber leaves off, for the reason 
that the whole region is itself a prodigious 
mountain, hundreds of thousands of square 
miles in area, of w^hich the projecting peaks 
are but exalted lookouts. The four summits of 
San Francisco Mountain are elevated nearly 
13,000 feet above the sea, and only 6,000 feet 
above the town of Flagstaff. It follows that 
more than half of the actual ascent has been 
made without any effort by the traveler, and 
the same altitude is attained as if he had 
4S 



climbed a sheer height of 13,000 feet upon the 
rim of the sea. There is the same rarefaction 
of air, the same wide range over an empire 
that lies flat beneath the eye, limited only by 
the interposition of other mountains, the spher- 
ical contour of the earth, atmospheric haze, or 
the power of vision itself. 

The apex of Humphrey's Peak, the only 
summit of this mountain yet practicable for 
the tourist, is little more than ten miles from 
Flagstaff, and an excellent carriage road covers 
fully seven miles of the distance. From the end 
of that road a comfortable bridle-path leads to 
within a few feet of the topmost crag. The en- 
tire trip may be made on horseback if desired, 
and one who is accustomed to the saddle will 
find it a preferable experience, for then short 
cuts are taken through the timber, and there is 
so much the more of freedom and the charm of 
an untrammeled forest. The road crosses a 
short stretch of clearing and then enters the 
magnificent pine park, rising at an easy grade 
and offering frequent backward glimpses. The 
strained, conscious severity of the Rock}- Moun- 
tain giants is wanting here. It is a mountain 
without egotism, breathing gentlest dignity, 
and frankly fond of its robe of verdure. Birds 
flit and carol in its treetops, and squirrels play. 
Grass and fern do not fear to make soft -cush- 
ioned banks to allure the visitor, flowers riot in 
their season, and the aspens have whole hill- 
sides to themselves ; soft , 
twinkling bowers of deli- 
cate green, dells where 
one could wish to lie and 
49 





dream through long summer hours. The 
bridle-path begins, with the conventional zig- 
zag of mountain-trails, at the foot of a steep 
grass-grown terrace that lies in full view of the 
spreading panorama below. Above that sunny 
girdle the trail winds through a more typical 
mountain forest, where dead stalks of pine and 
fir are plentifully sprinkled among the living, 
and ugly swaths show where the avalanche has 
passed. Above this, for the remaining few 
hundred feet, the peaks stand bare — stern, 
swart crags that brook no mantle except the 
snows, encompassed by a quiet which only the 
wind redeems from everlasting silence. 

The outlook from Humphrey's Peak is one of 
the noblest of mountain views. It commands a 
recognizable territory of not less than seventy- 
five thousand square miles, with vague shadowy 
contours beyond the circle of definite vision. 
Categorically, as pointed out by the guide, the 
main features of the landscape are as follows : 
Directly north, the farther wall of the Grand 
Canon, at the Bright Angel Amphitheater, fifty 
miles away ; and topping that , the Buckskin 
Mountains of the Kaibab Plateau, thirty or 
forty miles farther distant. To the right, the 
Navajo Mountains, near the Colorado vState 
line, 200 miles. In the northeast, the wonder- 
ful Painted Desert, tinted with rainbow-hues, 
and the Navajo Reservation. Below that the 
Moqui buttes and villages. Toward the east, 
the broad plateau and desert as far as the 
divide near Navajo Springs, 130 miles east 
from Flagstaff b}^ the railroad. In the south- 
east the White Mountains, more than 200 
50 



miles. In the south, successively, the MogoUon 
Plateau, a group of a dozen lakes — unlooked 
for sight in the arid lands — Baker's Butte, the 
Four Peaks, and the Superstition Mountains 
near Phrenix, the last named i6o miles distant. 
In the southwest, the Bradshaw Mountains, 140 
miles; Granite Mountain at Prescott, 100 miles, 
and the Juniper Range, 150 miles. The hori- 
zon directly west is vague and doubtful, but is 
supposed to lie near the California line. In the 
northwest a distant range is seen, north of the 
Colorado River and east of the Nevada line, 
perhaps the Sheavwits or the Hurricane ISIoun- 
tains. Among the less remote objects are the 
Coconino forest and basin on the north ; on the 
east the Little Colorado, traceable by its fringe 
of cotton woods, beds of lava flung like the 
shadow of a cloud or the trail of a conflagra- 
tion, and Sunset and Peachblow craters, black 
cones of cinder capped with red scoria; on the 
south and southwest Oak Creek Canon, the Je- 
rome smelters, and the rugged pictorial break- 
down of the Verde; underfoot, Flagstaff; and 
on the west the peaks of Bill Williams, Sit- 
greaves and Kendricks, neighborly near. 

Yet, in spite of the grandeur of such a scene, 
San Francisco Mountain itself soon gains and 
monopolizes the attention. It has slopes that 
bend in a single sweeping curve to depths 
which the brain reels to contemplate, down 
which a loosened stone will spin until the e3>e 
can no longer distinguish its course ; and there 
are huge folds and precipices and abysses of 
which no hint was given in the ascent. Per- 
haps its most attractive single feature is a 
51 




profound bowl-shaped cavity between Hum- 
phrey's and Agassiz peaks, overhung by 
strangely sculptured cliffs that have the appear- 
ance of ruined castle walls perforated with rude 
doorways, windows and loopholes. It is called 
The Crater, and is almost completely boxed in 
by steep but uniform slopes of volcanic dust, 
in descending which a horse sinks to his fet- 
locks. On one side it breaks down into a canon 
leading off to the plain and set with tree, grass, 
fern and flower. Its axis is marked by two 
parallel lines of bare bowlders of great size, 
that might have been thrown up from the 
underlying rock by some prodigious ebullition 
of internal forces. 

The round trip to the peak is customarily 
made in a day, but arrangements may be made 
to remain upon the mountain over night if de- 
termined upon in advance, and such a plan is 
recommended to those who are reasonably 
hardy and have never seen the glories of sunset 
and sunrise from a mountain-height. Among 
the great mountains of America whose ascent is 
made without the aid of the railway engineer, 
there is hardly another that at the cost of so 
little hardship yields so rich a reward. 

THE GRAND CANOX OF THE COLORADO. 

The series of tremendous chasms which form 
the channel of the Colorado River in its course 
through northern Arizona reach their culmina- 
tion in a chaotic gorge 217 miles long, from 9 
to 13 miles wide, and, midway, more than 6,600 
feet below the level of the plateau. Standing 
upon the brink of that plateau, at the point of 
52 




1 ! 



\JK 




-/.:■' '.Ill >:'/ tl 4t 



the canon's greatest width and depth, the be- 
holder is confronted by a scene whose majesty 
and beauty are well-nigh unbearable. Snatched 
in a single glance from every accustomed an- 
chorage of human experience, the stoutest 
heart here quavers, the senses cower. It is one 
of the few \videly advertised spots which one 
need not fear approaching wath anticipations 
too exalted. It is a new world, compelling 
the tribute of sensations whose intensity ex- 
ceeds the familiar signification of words. It 
never has been adequately described, and never 
will be. If you say of Niagara's gorge that it is 
profound, what shall you say of the Colorado's 
chasm that yawns beneath your feet to a depth 
nearly fifty times greater ? If you have looked 
down from the height of the Eiffel tower and 
called it vertiginous, what shall you say when 
you are brought to the verge of a gulf at points 
of which you may drop a plummet five times 
as far? And when you face, not a mere nar- 
row frowning gash of incredible depth, but a 
broad underworld that reaches to the utter- 
most horizon and seems as vast as the earth 
itself ; studded with innumerable pyramidal 
mountains of massive bulk hewn from gaudiest 
rock-strata, that barely lift the cones and turrets 
of their crests to the level of the eye ; divided 
by purple voids ; banded in vivid colors of 
transparent brilliancy that are harmonized by 
atmosphere and refraction to a marvelous 
delicacy; controlled by a unity of idea that 
redeems the whole from the menace of over- 
whclmini; chaos — then, surely, you maybe par- 






54 



-^4 



I 




(-neA^ 



doned if your pen halts in its description. Some 
attempt, however, has been made in ''The 
Grand Canon of the Colorado River'' to which 
the reader is referred who can not avail of the 
magnificent volumes of Powell and Button, and 
desires a more intimate knowledge than can be 
derived from the graceful and eloquent pages 
devoted to the subject in Warner's "Our Italy." 
The Grand Canon is sixty-five miles distant 
from Flagstaff by a nearly level road, through 
a region that presents in turn nearly all the 
characteristic features of Arizona. Except in 
the winter months, at which time the journey 
can be undertaken only when weather and 
roads are favorable, a tri- weekly stage makes 
the trip to the caiion in less than twelve hours, 
including stop for dinner midway. Passengers 
quit the stage upon the very rim of the caiion, 
at the most impressive point, and so long as 
they may choose to remain are provided with 
comfortable lodgings and excellent meals. 

CLIFF AND CAVE DWELLINGS. 

This region abounds in scattered ruins of 
the dwellings of a prehistoric people. The 
most important yet discovered lie within a 
radius of eight miles from Flagstaff and are 
easily accessible. 

On the southeast, Walnut Caiion breaks the 
plateau for a distance of several miles, its. 
walls deeply eroded in horizontal parallel lines. 
In these natural recesses, floored and roofed 
by the more enduring strata, the cliff-dwellings 
are found in great number, walled up on the 
front and sides with rock fragments and ce- 
55 










ment, and partitioned into compartments. 
Some have fallen into decay, only portions of 
their walls remaining, and but a narrow shelf 
of the once broad floor of solid rock left to evi- 
dence their extreme antiquity. Others are 
almost wholly intact, having stubbornly re- 
sisted the weathering of time. Nothing but 
fragments of pottery now remain of the many 
quaint implements and trinkets that character- 
ized these dwellings at the time of their 
discovery and have since been exhumed by 
scientist and collector. At least, nothing of 
value is supposed to remain about those that 
are commonly visited. Many others, more 
difficult to explore, may yet yield a store of 
archaeological treasure. 

Fixed like swallows' nests upon the face 
of a precipice, approachable from above or 
below only by deliberate and cautious climbing, 
these dwellings have the appearance of forti- 
fied retreats rather than habitual abodes. That 
there was a time, in the remote past, when 
warlike peoples of mysterious origin passed 
southward over this plateau is generally cred- 
ited. And the existence of the cliff-dwellings 
is ascribed to the exigencies of that dark 
period, when the inhabitants of the plateau, 
unable to cope with the superior energy, in- 
telligence and numbers of the descending 
hordes, devised these unassailable retreats. 
All their quaintness and antiquity can not con- 
ceal the deep pathos of their being, for tragedy 
is written all over these poor hovels hung 
between earth and sky. Their builders hold 
no smallest niche in recorded history. Their 
56 











^-^ 



■^^^4 










aspirations, their struggles and their fate are 
all unwritten, save on these crumbling stones, 
which are their sole monument and meager 
epitaph. Here once they dwelt. They left no 
other print on time. 

At an equal distance to the north of Flag- 
staff, among the cinder-buried cones, is one 
whose summit commands a wide-sweeping view 
of the plain. Upon its apex, in the innumera- 
ble spout-holes that were the outlet of ancient 
eruptions, are the cave-dwellings, around many 
of which rude stone-walls still stand. The story 
of these habitations is likewise wholly conjec- 
tural. They may have been contemporary with 
the cliff-dwellings. That they were long inhab- 
ited is clearly apparent. Fragments of shat- 
tered pottery lie on every hand. 

CENTRAL AND SOUTHERN ARIZONA. 

From Ash Fork, west of Flagstaff, the Santa 
Fe, Prescott& Phoenix Railroad extends south- 
ward through Prescott to Phoenix. In a dis- 
tance of less than 200 miles the traveler is 
afforded glimpses of nearly every variety of 
57 




f^> 






«*^,>^-u 



iF^-^.ti^m, 



JA'-4 



^^'!^^"'1M 




W' 



-^ii^' 














^::k:3* — 







scenery typical of the territory. There are 
bleak, barren mountains, and mountains cov- 
ered with forests of pine, on whose slopes are 
seen the dumps of world-famous mines. There 
are rocky desert wastes where only uncouth 
cacti find footing to give some poor semblance 
of life and hope, and vast arid stretches which 
in early spring are overspread with flowers, 
among which the poppy predominates and by 
virtue of its superior size and brilliancy carpets 
the ground with an almost unbroken sheet of 
tawny flame, far as the eye can reach on either 
hand. There are waterless canons, and canons 
walling turbid streams, unreclaimed vales dot- 
ted with cattle, and broad irrigated valley-plains 
level as a floor, where is cultivated in extraor- 
dinary profusion nearly every variety of fruit, 
nut and vegetable not absolutely restricted to 
the tropics, in addition to an enormous acreage 
of alfalfa and the ordinary cereals of the north 
temperate zone. 

Both north and south of Prescott some pretty 
engineering problems have been solved, with a 
58 



I 



^ - C'^:^^^--<£^^ 




59 




■>> 



picturesque result of rock-cuts, trestles, detours, 
and loops where distance is artificialty created 
in order that grade may be overcome. At 
many points one marvels at the audacious imag- 
ination of the man who conceived it possible to 
construct a path for the locomotive through a 
region so desperately hostile. Here in a gorge 
uptilted lofty rock-pillars and tremendous 
bowlders lying shoulder to shoulder contest the 
passage; yonder, on a slope, you may see far 
below a second parallel track, and below that 
a third forming a sweeping loop by which the 
safe descent of the train is accomplished and 
the ascent of the opposite train made possible. 
The developed agricultural and horticultural 
areas are in the neighborhood of Phoenix. The 
climate is especially friendly to invalids, even 
during the hot summer 
months, but as in the 
60 




case of other southwestern health and pleas- 
ure resorts, winter brings the influx of visitors. 
The beneficent effect of this climate upon the 
sick, or upon those who merely seek an enjoy- 
able retreat from the harsh winter of the North 
and East, is not easily exaggerated. The hotel 
accommodations have been greatly enlarged 
and improved in recent years, the early winter 
of i8g6 in particular having been marked by 
the opening of the Adams House, a caravan- 
sary of which older and more populous com- 
munities might well be proud. It was promptly 
filled to overflowing, and the erection of other 
modern hotels will speedily follow, for Phoenix 
is rapidly becoming one of the greatest of win- 
ter resorts in the southwest. The valley, of 
which it is the center, is one of marvelous 
loveliness, which only the painter's art can 
convey to one who has not beheld it. Of the 
valleys of the West there are four pre-eminent 
in beauty — the San Gabriel and Santa Clara 
in California, the valley of Salt Lake in Utah, 
and this of the Salt River. Across the restful 
and infinitely modulated green of orchard and 
shade trees, of alfalfa and barley fields, the 
eye is led to a distant horizon of rugged moun- 
tains, where shifting light and shadow make 
an endless play of color, astonishingly vivid to 
a traveler new to desert landscapes and un- 
ceasingly attractive day after day. 

The greatest mineral development is in the 
vicinity of Prescott. Here, among other fa- 
mous deposits, are the United Verde copper 
mines and the Congress and Rich Hill gold 
mines, the last named situated upon an isolated 
6i 




peak, where in the early days gold was literally 
whittled from the rock with knives and chisels. 
The tourist will do well to include in his itin- 
erary a visit of inspection to some one of these 
numerous repositories of treasure. 




IV. 
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA. 

FEW miles beyond the Colorado River 
crossing at The Needles is the rail- 
road station of that name, where 
the remnant of the once powerful 
and warlike Mojave tribe, now become beg- 
garly hangers-on to civilization, love to congre- 
gate and offer inferior wares in the shape of 
bows and arrows and pottery trinkets to trav- 
elers in exchange for coin. Their hovels are 
scattered along the wayside, and the eager con- 
gregation of women peddlers, some with naked 
babies sitting stoically astride their hips, and 
all dubiously picturesque in paint and rags, is 
sufficiently diverting. The men attain gigantic 
stature, and are famed for their speed and bot- 
tom as runners; but their ability might be fairly 
taxed by the tourist of average capacity who 
for any cause felt himself in danger of being 
62 




compelled to share their abode or mingle inti- 
mately with them. A sound-heeled Achilles 
would fall behind in pursuit of the fleer from 
such a sorry fate. 

But this is California, the much-lauded land 
of fruit and flower and sunny clime, of moun- 
tain and shore and sea-girt isle ; land of para- 
doxes, where winter is the season of bloom and 
fruitage and summer is nature's time of slum- 
ber. The traveler enters it for the first time 
with a vivid preconception of its splendors. 

By way of introduction you are borne across 
the most sterile portion of the most hopeless 
waste in America, whose monotony intercepts 
every approach to California except that round- 
about one by way of the sea. On either 
hand lies a drear stretch of sand and alkali, 
relieved only by black patches of lava and a 
mountainous horizon — a Nubian desert un- 
marked by a single human habitation outside 
the lonely path of the locomotive; where not 
even the cry of a wolf breaks the grim silence 
of desolation. Through this the train hastens 
to a more elevated country, arid still, but re- 
lieved by rugged rocks, the esthetic gnarled 
trunks and bolls of the yucca and occasional 
growths of deciduous trees. You enter the 
Cajon Pass. 

Did not the journey include a return through 
Colorado, which is distinctive in mountain 
scenery, Cajon Pass would bear extended men- 
tion. It is the loveliest imaginable scene, a 
gently billowing mountain flank densely set 
with thickets of manzanita, gleaming through 
whose glossy foliage and red stems the pale earth 
63 





rises here and there in gracefvil dunes of white 
unflecked by grass or shrub, overhung by 
parallel-terraced ridges of the San Bernardino 
Mountains, that pale in turn to a topmost 
height far in the blue Italian sky. Entirely 
wanting in the austerity that characterizes the 
grander mountains of loftier altitudes, it takes 
you from the keeping of plateau and desert, 
and by seductive windings leads you down to 
the garden of California. Typical scenes at 
once appear. On either hand are seen or- 
chards of the peach, apricot, prune, olive, fig 
almond, walnut, and that always eagerly antici- 
pated one of the orange. 

You will not, however, find this whole land a 
jungle of orange and palm trees, parted only 
by thick banks of flowers. The world is wide, 
even in California, or, one might better say, 
particularly in California, where over an area 
averaging 150 miles wide and 1,000 miles 
long is scattered a population no greater 
than that of the city of Chicago. It is true 
that at many places along your route you may 
almost pluck oranges by reaching from the 
car window in passing; but the celebrated 
products of California lie in restricted areas of 
cultivation, which you are expected to visit; 
and herein lies much of the Calif ornian's pride, 
that there still remains so much of opportunity 
for all. There is everything in California that 
has been credited to it, but what proves not un- 
commonly a surprise is the relatively small area 
of improved land and the consequent fre- 
quency of unfructed intervals. Only a mo- 
ment's reflection is needed to perceive that the 
64 








r^ — wiiifiwil'H'ii rr^l 



65 



case could not be otherwise. As for flowers, 
even here they are not eternal, except in the 
thousands of watered gardens. In the dry 
summer season the hills turn brown and sleep. 
Only when the winter rains have slaked the 
parched earth do the grass and flowers awake, 
and then for a few months there is enough of 
bloom and fragrance to satisfy the most exu- 
berant fancy. 

Now past pretty horticultural communities, 
flanked by the Sierra Madre, the way leads 
quickly from San Bernardino to Pasadena and 
Los Angeles. 

Southward from the last-named city you pass 
through a fruitful region, and within a stone's 
throw of the impressive mission-ruins of Capis- 
trano, to a shore where the long waves of the 
Pacific break upon gleaming white sands and 
the air is of the sea. Blue as the sky is the 
Pacific, paling in the shallows toward land, and 
flecked with bright or somber cloud reflections 
and smurring ripples of the breeze. It is not 
only the westerly bound of the North American 
Continent, it is the South Seas of old adventure, 
where many a hulk of once treasure-laden gal- 
leons lies fathoms deep among the queer deni- 
zens of the sea who repeat wild legends of 
naughty buccaneers. There is challenge to the 
imagination in the very tracklessnessof the sea. 
On the wrinkled face of earth you may read 
earth's story. She has laid things to heart. She 
broods on memories. But the sea denies the 
past; it is as heedless of events that were as the 
air is of the path where yesterday a butterfly 
was winging. Its incontinent expanse is allur- 
66 




ing to the fancy, and this sunset sea even more 
than the tempestuous ocean that beats upon our 
eastern shores, for it is so lately become our 
possession it seems still a foreign thing, strewn 
with almost as many wrecks of Spanish hopes 
as of galleons; and into its broad bosom the sun 
sinks to rise upon quaint antipodean peoples, 
beyond a thousand mysterious inhabited islands 
in the swirls of the equatorial currents. 

Next, swinging inland to find the pass of the 
last intervening hills, you make a final descent 
to the water's edge, and come to San Diego, 
that dreamy city of Mediterranean atmosphere 
and color, terraced along the rim of a sheltered 
bay of surpassing beauty. Guarding the mouth 
of the harbor lies the long crescent peninsular 
of Coronado, the pale facades of whose mam- 
moth hotel flash through tropical vegetation 
across the blue intervening waters. 

OF CLIMATE. 

Here the sun habitually shines. Near the 
coast flows the broad equable Japanese ocean- 
current, from which a tempered breeze sweeps 
overland every morning, every night to return 
from the cool mountain-tops. Between the first 
of May and the last of October rain almost never 
falls. By the end of June the earth has evap- 
orated most of its surface moisture, and vegeta- 
tion unsustained by artificial watering begins 
to languish. The midday temperature now 
rises, but the same breeze swings like a pendu- 
lum between ocean and mountain, and night 
and early morning are no less invigorating. 
This is summer, a joyous and active season 
67 




generally misconceived by the tourist, who not 
unreasonably visits California in the winter- 
time to escape Northern cold and snow, and in- 
fers an unendurable torrid summer from a 
winter of mildness and luxuriance. 

With November the first showers generally 
begin, followed by an occasional heavy down- 
pour, and Northern pastures now whiten under 
falling snow hardly faster than do these sere 
hills turn beryl -green. The rainy season is so 
called not because it is characterized by contin- 
uous rainfall, but to distinguish it from that 
portion of the year in which rain can not be 
looked for. Bright days are still the rule, and 
showery days are marked by transcendent 
beauties of earth and sky, fleeting wonders of 
form and color. Let the morning open with a 
murky zenith, dark tumbled cloud-masses 
dropping shower. As the invisible sun mounts, 
he peeps unexpectedly through a rift to see 
that his world is safe, then vanishes. The sky 
has an unrelenting look. The mountains are 
obscured. Suddenly, far to the left, a rift 
breaks dazzling white, just short of where the 
rain is falling on the hills in a long bending 
column, and at one side a broad patch pales 
into mottled gray; and below the rift a light 
mist is seen floating on the flank of a 
mountain that shoots into sharp relief 
against a vapor-wall of slate. At the 
mountain's foot a whole hillside shows in warm 
brown tint, its right edge merged in a low flat 
cloud of silver, born, you could aver, on the 
instant, from which the truncated base of a 
second mountain depends, blue as indigo. The 
68 



face of earth, washed newly, is a patchwork of 
somber find, gaudy transparent colors — yellows, 
greens, sepias, grays. One's range and clearness 
of vision are quickly expanded, as when a tele- 
scope is fitted to the eye. Now begins a wonder- 
ful shifting of light and shadow, peeps through a 
curtain that veils unbearable splendors of upper 
sky; gradual dissolutions of cloud into curls and 
twists and splashes, with filling of blue between. 
Again the sun appears, at first with a pale bur- 
nished light, flashing and fading irresolutely 
until at length it flames out with summer ardor. 
The clouds break into still more curious forms, 
into pictures and images of quaint device, and 
outside a wide circle of brilliant sunlight all 
the hills are in purple shadow, fading into 
steel-blue, and about their crests cling wisps of 
many-colored fleece. Here and there a distant 
peak is blackly hooded, or gleams subtly be- 
hind an intervening shower — a thin transparent 
wash of smoky hue. The veil quickly dissi- 
pates, and at the same instant the peak is 
robbed of its sunlight by billows of vapor that 
marshal in appalling magnificence. Then the 
rain-mist advances and hides the whole from 
view. A strip of green next flashes on the 
sight, a distant field lighted by the sun, but 
lying unaccountably beneath a cloud of black. 
Beyond, the broad foot of a rainbow winks and 
disappears. Among all the hilltops rain next 
begins to fall like amber smoke, so thin is the 
veil that shields them from the sun. Then the 
sun abruptly ceases to shine, the whole heavens 
are overcast, and between the fine fast-falling 
drops the ground gleams wet in cool gray light. 

^9 i.'^^.J^^'^ 




^a-^' 



By noon the sun again is shining clear, although 
in occasional canons there is night and deluge, 
and at the close of a bright afternoon the far- 
thest, loftiest peak has a white cloud wreath 
around it, as symmetrical as a smoke-ring 
breathed from the lips of a senorita; and out of 
the middle of it rises the fragment of a rainbow 
— a cockade on a mist-laureled Matterhorn. 
Then the sun drops, and the day is done. 




That is the way it rains in Cahfornia, and be- 
tween such days are unclouded intervals of 
considerable duration. They call this season 
winter. The temperature is so finely balanced 
one does not easily decide whether to walk 
70 



upon the sunny or the shady side of the street. 
It is cool, not cold, not bracing in the ordinary 
sense, but just the proper temperature for con- 
tinuous out-of-door life. June does not define 
it, nor September. It has no synonym. But 
if you cared to add one more to the many un- 
successful attempts to define it in a phrase, you 
might term it constant delicious weather; to- 
day, to-morrow, and indefinitely in the future, 
morally certain to be very much as you would 
have it if you were to create an air and a sky 
exactly to suit his or her majesty yourself. But 
even here man is a clothes-wearing animal. 
There is a coolness pervading the most brilliant 
sunshine. Remembering this, the most appre- 
hensive person will soon discover that there is 
no menace in the dry, pure and gently invigor- 
ating air of the Southern California winter. It 
wins the invalid to health by enticing him to 
remain out-of-doors. 

Ranging from warm sea-level to peaks of 
frigid inclemency, this varied state offers many 
climatic gradations, whose contrasts are nearly 
always in view. In winter you may sit upon 
almost any veranda in Southern California and 
lift your eyes from the brilliant green of orna- 
mental trees and shrubs, from orchards where 
fruits ripen in heavy clusters, and from the 
variegated bloom of gardens, to ragged horizon- 
lines buried deep in snow. There above is a 
frozen waste and Alpine terror. Here below is 
summer, shorn of summer languor. And be- 
tween may be found any modification that 
could reasonably be sought, each steadfast in 
its own characteristics. 
71 




72 



The smallest of these communities is great 
in content. Literally couched beneath his own 
vine and fig-tree, plucking from friendly 
boughs delicious fruits, finding in the multi- 
farious products of the soil nearly everything 
needful in domestic economy, and free from 
most of the ills that flesh was thought to be 
heir to, what w^onder that the Californian en- 
vies no man, nor ever looks wistfully over the 
sierra's crest toward the crowded cities and 
precarious farming regions of the East ? An 
upHfting environment for a home, truly, fit to 
breed a race worthy of the noblest empire 
among the States. There is work to be done, 
in the house and the field, but in such an air 
and scene it is as near a transfiguration of labor 
as can well be imagined. Here it is indeed a 
poor boy or girl who has not a pony on which 
to scamper about, or lacks liberty for such en- 
joyment. And every year there comes a period 
of holiday, an interval when there is no plant- 
ing or harvesting to be done, no picking or 
drying or packing of fruit, a recuperating spell 
of nature, when the weather is just as glorious 
as ever, and the mountains and ocean beckon 
seductively to the poet that is in the heart of 
every unharassed man and woman and child. 
Then for weeks the caiions are dotted with 
tents, where the mountain-torrent foams and 
spreading sycamores are festooned with mis- 
tletoe; and the trout of the stream and the 
game of the forest have their solstice of woe. 
Or, on the rim of the sea, thousands of merry 
hearts, both young and old, congregate and 
hold high carnival. When the campers return 




to shop and field it is not by reason of any in- 
clemency of weather, but because their term of 
holiday has expired. Then come the tourists, 
and pale fugitives from the buffets of Boreas, 
to wander happily over hillside and shore in a 
land unvexed by the tyranny of the seasons. 

The most seductive of lands, and the most 
tenacious in its hold upon you. You have done 
but little, and a day has fled; have idled, 
walked, ridden, sailed a little, have seen two 
or three of the thousand things to be seen, and 
a week, a month, is gone. You could grieve 
that such golden burdenless hours should ever 
go into the past, did they not flow from an in- 
exhaustible fount. For to be out all day in the 
careless freedom of perfect weather; to ramble 
over ruins of a former occupation; to wander 
through gardens and orchards; to fish, to shoot, 
to gather flowers from the blossoming hill- 
slopes; to explore a hundred fascinating re- 
treats of mountain and shore; to lounge on the 
sands by the surf until the sun drops into the 
sea; all this is permitted by the Southern Cali- 
fornia winter. 

SAN DIEGO AND VICINITY. 

Fringing a bay that for a dozen miles glows 
like a golden mirror below its purple rim, San 
Diego stands upon a slope that rises from the 
water to the summit of a broad mesa. In front 
the bold promontory of Point Loma juts into 
the sea, overlapping the low, slender peninsu- 
lar of Coronado, and between them lies the 
narrow entrance to this most beautiful of har- 
bors. One may be happy in San Diego and do 
74 




nothing. Its soft, 
sensuous beauty 
and caressing air 
create in the breast 
a new sense of the 
joy of mere exist- 
ence. But there is, 
besides, abundant material for the sight-seer. 
Here, with many, begins the first leisurely and 
intimate acquaintance with those objects of un- 
failing interest, the growing orange and lemon. 
Orchards are on every hand; not in the profu- 
sion that characterizes some of the more exten- 
sively developed localities, but still abundant, 
and inferior to none in fruitage. Paradise Val- 
ley, the Valley of the Sweetwater, where may 
be seen the great irrigating fount of so many 
farms, and Mission Valley, where the San Diego 
River flows and the dismantled ruin of the old- 
est California mission, elbowed by a modern 
Indian school, watches over its ancient but still 
vigorous trees, afford the most impressive exam- 
ples of these growing fruits in the immediate 
neighborhood. El Cajon Valley is celebrated 
for its vineyards. At National City, four miles 
away, are extensive olive orchards. Fifteen 
miles to the south the Mexican village of Tia 
■Jtiana attracts many visitors, whose average 
experience consists of a pleasant railroad ride 
to the border and a half-hour's residence in a 
foreign country; but the noble coast scenery of 
Point of Rocks, the boundary monument, and 
remarkable hot sulphur springs are reached by 
a short and attractive drive from that little 
Lower California town . 
75 



The diverse allurements of mountain and 
valley, and northward -stretching shore of alter- 
nating beach and high commanding bluff, are 
innumerable, but the catalogue of their names 
does not fall within the province of these 
pages. One marvelous bit of coast, thirteen 
miles away and easily reached by railway or 
carriage-drive, must however have specific 
mention. It is La Jolla Park. Here a plateau 
overlooks the open sea from a bluff that 
tumbles precipitously to a narrow strip of 
sand. The face of the cliff for a distance of 
several miles has been sculptured by the waves 
into most curious forms. It projects in rec- 
tangular blocks, in stumps, stools, benches, and 
bas-reliefs that strikingly resemble natural ob- 
jects, their surfaces chiseled intaglio with 
almost intelligible devices. Loosened frag- 
ments have worn deep symmetrical wells, or 
pot-holes, to which the somewhat inadequate 
Spanish-Indian name of the place is due; and 
what seem at first glance to be enormous bowl- 
ders loosely piled, with spacious interstices 
through which the foam spurts and crashes, are 
the selfsame solid cliff, carved and polished, 
but not wholly separated by the sea. Some of 
the cavities are mere pockets lined with mussels 
and minute weeds with calcareous leaves. 
Others are commodious secluded apartments, 
quite commonly used as dressing-rooms by 
bathers. The real caverns can be entered dry- 
shod only at lowest tide. The cliff where they 
lie is gnawed into columns, arches and aisles, 
through which one cave after another may be 
seen, dimly lighted, dry and practicable. Sev- 
76 







c II 














s^'- 



78 



enty-five feet is probably their utmost depth . 
They are the culmination of this extraordinary 
work of an insensate sculptor. There are 
alcove-niches, friezes of small gray and black 
mosaic, horizontal bands of red, and high- 
vaulted roofs. If the native California Indians 
had possessed a poetic temperament they must 
certainly have performed religious rites in such 
a temple. The water is as pellucid as a moun- 
tain spring. The flush of the waves foams 
dazzling white and pours through the intrica- 
cies of countless channels, tunnels and fissures 
in overwhelming torrents, and in the brief 
intervals between ebb and rise the bottom of 
rock and clean sand gleams invitingly through 
a depth of many feet. Sea-anemones are 
thickly clustered upon the lower levels, their 
tinted petal-filaments scintillating in the shal- 
low element, or closed bud-like while waiting for 
the flood. Little crabs scamper in disorderly pro- 
cession through the crevices at your approach, 
and that univalve with the ornamental shell, 
known everywhere as the abalone, is also abun- 
dant. Seaweeds, trailing in and out with the 
movement of the tide, flame through the trans- 
parent water in twenty shades of green, and 
schools of goldfish flash in the swirling current, 
distorted by the varying density of the eddies 
into great blotches of brilliant color, unquench- 
able firebrands darting hither and yon in their 
play. They are not the true goldfish whose 
habitat is a globular glass half-filled with tepid 
water, but their hue is every whit as vivid. In 
the time of flowers this whole plateau is cov- 
ered with odorous bloom. 
79 




/^ 



Then there is Coronado. Connected by ferry 
and by railroad with the mainland, Coronado 
bears the same relation to San Diego that fash- 
ionable suburbs bear to many Eastern cities, 
and at the same time affords recreative pleas- 
ures which the inhabitants of those suburbs 
must go far to seek. Here the business-man 
dwells in Elysian bowers by the sea, screened 
from every reminder of business cares, yet 
barely a mile distant from office or shop. Lock- 
ing up in his desk at evening all the prosaic 
details of bank or factory, of railroad rates, of 
the price of stocks and real estate and wares, 
in ten minutes he is at home on what is in 
effect a South Sea island, where brant and cur- 
lew and pelican fly, and not all the myriad 
dwellings and the pomp of their one architec- 
tural splendor can disturb the air of perfect 
restfulness and sweet rusticity. From the low 
ridge of the narrow peninsular may be seen, 
upon the one hand, a wide-sweeping moun- 
tainous arc, dipping to the pretty city that 
borders the bay. Upon the other, the unob- 
structed ocean rolls. On the ocean side, just 
beyond reach of the waves, stands the hotel 
whose magnificence has given it leading rank 
among the famous hostelries of the world. It is 
built around a quadrangular court, or patio — a. 
dense garden of rare shrubs and flowering 
plants more than an acre in extent. Upon this 
patio many sleeping rooms open byway of the 
circumjacent balcony, besides fronting upon 
ocean and bay, and a glass-covered veranda, 
extending nearly the entire length of the west- 
ern frontage, looks over the sea toward the 




peaks of the distant Coronado islands. On the 
north lies Point Loma and the harbor entrance, 
on the east San Diego Bay and city, and on the 
south Glorieta Bay and the mountains of Mex- 
ico, beyond a broad half-circle of lawn dotted 
with semi-tropical trees and bright beds of 
flowers, and bordered by hedges of cypress. 

Here the fisherman has choice of surf or bil- 
low or the still surface of sheltered waters; of 
sailboat, skiff or iron pier. The gunner finds 
no lack of sea-fowl, quail or rabbits. The 
bather may choose between surf and huge 
tanks of salt-water, roofed with glass, fringed 
with flowers and fitted Avith devices to en- 
hance his sport. The sight-seer is provided 
with a score of special local attractions, and all 
the resources of the mainland are at elbow. 
These diversions are the advantage of geo- 
graphical location, independent of the social 
recreations one naturally finds in fashionable 
resorts, at hotels liberally managed and fre- 
quented by representatives of the leisure class. 

The climate of the coast is necessarily dis- 
tinguished from that of the interior by greater 
humidity, and the percentage of invisible 
moisture in the air, however small, must infal- 
libly be greater at Coronado than upon the 
Heights of San Diego, and greater in San 
Diego than at points farther removed from the 
sea. This is the clue to the only flaw in the 
otherwise perfect coast climate, and it is a flaw 
only to supersensitive persons, invalids of a 
certain class. The consumptive too often 
delays taking advantage of the benefits of 
climatic change until he has reached a point 
8i 




when nicest discrimination has become neces- 
sary. The purest, driest and most rarefied air 
compatible with the compUcations of disease is 
his remedy, if remedy exist for him. And the 
driest and most rarefied air is not to be looked 
for by the sea. Yet the difference is not great 
enough to be brusquely prohibitory. No one 
need fear to go to the coast, and a short stay 
will determine whether or no the relief that is 
sought can there be found; while for many 
derangements it is preferable to the interior. 
For him who is not in precarious condition the 
foregoing observations have no significance. 
He will find the climate of all Southern Cali- 
fornia a mere gradation of glory. But per- 
haps around San Diego, and at one or two 
other coast points, there will seem to be a 
spirit even gentler than that which rules the 
hills. 

CAPISTRANO. 

A tiny quaint village in a fertile valley that 

slopes from a 
mountain wall 
the sea, un- 
kempt and mon- 
grel, a jumble 
of adobe ruins, 
white-w ashed 
hovels and low 
semi -modern 




-<^/f,^/>' 










structures, straggling like a moraine from the 
massive ruin of the Mission San Juan Capis- 
trano. The mission dominates the valley. Go 
where you will, the eye turns to this colossal 
fragment, a forlorn but vital thing; broken, 
crushed, and yet undying. Swarthy faces are 
mingled with the pale Saxon type, the music of 
the Spanish tongue is heard wherever you hear 
human speech, and from behind the lattices of 
the adobes come the tinkle of guitars and the 
cadence of soft voices in plaintive rhythm. The 
sun makes black shadows by every house and 
tree, and sweeps in broad unbroken light over 
the undulating hills to hazy mountain-tops; 
ground squirrels scamper across the way, wild 
doves start up with whistling wings, and there 
is song of birds and cry of barnyard fowls. 
The essence of the scene is passing quiet and 
peace. The petty noises of the village are 
powerless to break the silence that enwraps the 
noble ruin; its dignity is as imperturbable as 
that of mountain and sea. Never was style of 
architecture more spontaneously in touch with 
its environment than that followed by the mis- 



sion builders. It is rhythm and cadence and 
rhyme. It is perfect art. Earthquake has rent, 
man has despoiled, time has renounced the 
Mission San Juan Capistrano, yet its pure 
nobility survives, indestructible. The tower 
has fallen, the sanctuary is bare and weather- 
beaten, the cloisters of the quadrangle are 
roofless, and the bones of forgotten padres lie 
beneath the roots of tangled shrubbery; but 
the bells still hang in their rawhide lashings, 
and the cross rises white against the sky. A 
contemptuous century has rolled past, and the 
whole ambitious and once promising dream of 
monkish rule has long since ended, but this 
slow crumbling structure will not have it so. 
Like some dethroned and superannuated king, 
whose insistent claim to royal function cloaks 
him with a certain grandeur, it sits in silent 
state, too venerable for disrespect and too 
august for pity. 

STORY OF THE MISSIONS. 

In the middle of the eighteenth century the 
Spanish throne, desiring to encourage colo- 
nization of its territory of Upper California, then 
unpeopled save by native Indian tribes, en- 
tered into an arrangement with the Order of St. 
Francis by virtue of which that order undertook 
to establish missions in the new country which 
were to be the nuclei of future villages and 
cities, to which Spanish subjects were encour- 
aged to emigrate. By the terms of that ar- 
rangement the Franciscans were to possess the 
mission properties and their revenues for ten 
years, which was deemed a sufficient period in 
84 



which to fairly estabHsh the colonies, when the 
entire property was to revert to the Spanish 
government. In point of fact the Franciscans 
were left in undisputed possession for more 
than half a century. 

The monk chosen to take charge of the un- 
dertaking was Junipero Serra, a man of saintly 
piety and energetic character, who in child- 
hood desired only that he might be a priest, 
and in maturity earnestly wished to be a mar- 
tyr. Seven years before the Declaration of 
the Independence of the American Colonies, in 
the early summer of 1769, he entered the bay 
of San Diego, 227 ^^ears after Cabrillo had dis- 
covered it for Spain and 167 years after it had 
been surveyed and named by Viscaino, during 
all which preceding time the country had lain 
fallow. Within two months Serra had founded 
a mission near the mouth of the San Diego 
River, which five years after was removed 
some six miles up the valley to a point about 
three miles distant from the present city of San 
Diego. From that time one mission after an- 
other was founded, twenty-one in all, from 
San Diego along the coast as far north as San 
Francisco. The more important of these were 
built of stone and a hard burnt brick that even 
now will turn the edge of the finest trowel. The 
labor of their construction was appalling. Brick 
had to be burnt, stone quarried and dressed, 
and huge timbers for rafters brought on men's 
shoulders from the mountain forests, some- 
times thirty miles distant, through rocky canons 
and over trackless hills. The Indians per- 
formed most of this labor, under direction 
of the fathers. These Indians were tractable, 
86 




,-'^ 

'"•^l^^'^^ .^^ 



as a rule. Once, or twice at most, they rose 
against their masters, but the policy of the 
padres was kindness and forgiveness, although 
it must be inferred that the condition of the 
Indians over whom they claimed spiritual and 
temporal authority was a form of slavery, with- 
out all the cruelties that usually pertain to en- 
forced servitude. They were the bondsmen of 
the padres, whose aim was to convert them to 
Christianity and civilization, and many thou- 
sands of them were persuaded to cluster 
around the missions, their daughters becoming 
neophytes in the convents, and the others con- 
tributing their labor to the erection of the 
enormous structures that occupied many acres 
of ground and to the industries of agriculture, 
cattle raising and a variety of manufactures. 
There were, after the primitive fashion of the 
time, woolen mills, wood working and black- 
smith shops, and such other manufactories as 
were practicable in the existing state of the 
arts, which could be made profitable. The 
mission properties soon became enormously 
valuable, their yearly revenues sometimes 
amounting to $2,000,000. The exportation of 
hides was one of the most important items, and 
merchant-vessels from our owm Atlantic sea- 
board, from England and from Spain sailed to 
the California coast for cargoes of that com- 
modity. Dana's romantic and universally read 
" Two Years Before the Mast " is the record of 
such a voyage. He visited California more 
than a half a century ago, and found its quaint 
Spanish-Indian life full of the picturesque and 
romantic. 

87 







^^l'i''""hn^U,,... 





The padres invariably selected a 
site favorable for defense, command- 
ing views of entrancing scenery, on 
the slopes of the most fertile valleys 
and convenient to the running water 
which was the safeguard of agriculture 
in a country of sparse and uncertain 
rainfall. The Indians, less warlike in 
nature than the roving tribes east of 
the Rockies, were almost universally 
submissive. If there was ever an Arcadia 
it was surely there and then. Against the blue 
of the sky, unspotted by a single cloud through 
many months of the year, snow-crowned moun- 
tains rose in dazzling relief, while oranges, 
olives, figs, dates, bananas and every other 
variety of temperate and sub-tropical fruit 
which had been introduced by the Spaniards, 
ripened in a sun whose ardency was tempered 
by the dryness of the air into an equability like 
that of June, while the regularly alternating 
breeze that daily swept to and from ocean and 
mountain made summer and winter almost in- 
distinguishable seasons, then as now, save for 
the welcome rains that characterize the latter. 
At the foot of the valley, between the mountain 
slopes, and never more than a few miles away, 
the waters of the Pacific rocked placidly in the 
brilliant sunlight or broke in foam upon a broad 
beach of sand. In such a scene Spaniard and 
Indian plied their peaceful vocations, the one 
in picturesque national garb, the other almost 
innocent of clothing, while over and around 
them lay an atmosphere of sacredness which 
even to this day clings to the broken arches and 
^ 88 



crumbling walls. Over the peaceful valleys a 
veritable angelus rang. The mellow bells of 
the mission churches summoned dusky hordes 
to ceremonial devotion. Want and strife were 
unknown. Prosperity and brotherly love ruled 
as never before. 

It is true they had their trials. Earthquakes, 
which have been almost unknown in California 
for a quarter of a century, were then not uncom- 
mon, and were at times disastrous. Rio de los 
Temblor es was the name of a stream derived 
from the frequency of earth rockings in the 
region through which it flowed ; and in the sec- 
ond decade of our century the dreaded tejnblor 
upset the 120-foot tower of the Mission San 
Juan Capistrano and sent it crashing down 
through the roof upon a congregation, of whom 
nearly forty perished. Those, too, were lawless 
times upon the main. Pirates, cruising the 
South Seas in quest of booty, hovered about 
the California coast, and then the mission men 
stood to their arms, while the women and chil- 
dren fled to the interior canons with their port- 
able treasures. One buccaneer, Bouchard, re- 
pulsed in his attempt upon Dolores and Santa 
Barbara, descended successfully upon another 
mission and dwelt there riotously for a time, 
carousing, and destroying such valuables as he 
could not carry away, while the entire popula- 
tion quaked in the forest along the Rio Trabuco. 
This was the same luckless San Juan Capistrano, 
six years after the earthquake visitation. Then, 
too, there were bickerings of a political nature, 
and struggles for place, after the rule of Mexico 
had succeeded to that of Spain, but the com- 
89 








r£s^ 




mon people troubled themselves little with such 
matters. 

The end of the Franciscan dynasty came 
suddenly with the secularization of the mission 
property by the Mexican government to replete 
the exhausted treasuries of Santa Ana. Sadly 
the fathers forsook the scene of their long labors, 
and silently the Indians melted away into the 
wilderness and the darkness of their natural 
ways, save such as had intermarried with the 
families of Spanish soldiers and colonists. The 
churches are now, for the most part, only de- 
cayed legacies and fragmentary reminders of a 
time whose like the world will never know again. 
Save only three or four, preserved by reverent 
hands, where modern worshipers, denational- 
ized and clad in American dress, still kneel 
and recite their orisons, the venerable ruins are 
forsaken by all except the tourist and the anti- 
quarian, and their bells are silent forever. One 
can not but feel the pity of it, for in the history 
of zealous servants of the cross there is hardly 
a more noteworthy name than that of Junipero 
Serra, and in the annals of their heroic endeav- 
or there is no more signal instance of absolute 
90 



failure than his who founded the California mis- 
sions, aside from the perpetuation of his saintly- 
name. They accomplished nothing so far as can 
now be seen. The descendants of their converts, 
what few have survived contact with the Anglo- 
Saxon, have no discoverable worth, and, to- 
gether with the greater part of the original 
Spanish population, have faded away, as if a 
blight had fallen upon them. 

But so long as one stone remains upon an- 
other, and a single arch of the missions still 
stands, an atmosphere will abide there, some- 
thing that does not come from mountain, or 
vale, or sea, or sky; the spirit of consecration, 
it may be; but if it is only the aroma of ancient 
and romantic associations, the suggestion of a 
peculiar phase of earnest and simple human life 
and quaint environment that is forever past, 
the mission-ruins must remain among the most 
interesting monuments in all our varied land, 
and will amply repay the inconsiderable effort 
and outlay required to enable the tourist to view 
them. San Diego, the oldest; San Luis Rey, 
the most poetically environed; San Juan Capis- 
trano, of most tragic memor}-; San Gabriel, the 
most imposing, and Santa Barbara, the most 
perfectly preserved, will suffice the casual sight- 
seer. These also lie comparatively near to- 
gether, and are all easily accessible; the first 
three being located on or adjacent to the rail- 
way line between Los Angeles and San Diego, 
the fourth standing but a few miles from the 
first-named city, and the fifth being almost in 
the heart of the famous resort that bears its 
name. 

91 




Reluctantly will the visitor tear himself from 
the encompassing charm of their roofless arches 
and reminiscent shadows. They are a dream 
of the Old World, indifferent to the sordidness 
and turbulency of the New; one of the few 
things that have been spared by a relentless 
past, whose habit is to sweep the things of 
yesterday into oblivion. Almost can one hear 
the echoes of their sweet bells ringing out to 
heathen thousands the sunset and the dawn. 




LOS ANGELES. 

One can hardly cross this continent of ours 
without gaining a new idea of the immense his- 
torical significance of the westward yearning of 
the Saxon, who in two and a half centuries has 
marched from Plymouth Rock to the Sunset 
Sea, and has subordinated every other people 
in his path from shore to shore. The Spaniard 
was a world-conqueror in his day, and master 
of California before the stars and stripes had 
been devised. The story of his subjugation of 
the southwestern portion of the New World is 
the most brilliant in modern history. It is a 
story of unexampled deeds of arms. Sword 
and cross, and love of fame and gold, are inex- 
tricably interwoven with it. The Saxon epic is 
a more complex tale of obscure heroism, of emi- 
grant cavalcades, of pioneer homes, of 
business enterprise. The world may 
never know sublimer indifference to 
fatigue, suffering and death than char- 
acterized the Spanish invaders of America 
for more than two centuries. Whatever 
the personal considerations that allured 
92 



them, the extension of Spanish empire and 
the advancement of the cross amid barba- 
rians was their effectual purpose. The con- 
quistador was a crusader, and with all his 
cruelty and rapacity he is a splendid figure of 
incarnate force. But the westward-flowing 
w^ave of Saxon conquest has set him, too, 
aside. In this fair land of California, won at 
smallest cost, and seemingly created for him, 
his descendants to-day are little more than a 
tattered fringe upon the edges of the displacing 
civilization. He has left his mark upon every 
mountain and valley in names that will long 
endure, but himself has been supplanted. He 
has not fled. He has diminished, faded away. 
In 1 78 1 he named this city Pueblo de la 
Rema de los Augeles (Town of the Queen of 
the Angels). The Saxon, the Man of Business 
now supreme, has retained only the last two 
words of that high-sounding appellation; and 
hardly a greater proportion remains of the 
original atmosphere of this old Spanish town. 
You will find a Spanish (Mexican) quarter, un- 
kempt and adobe, containing elements of the 
picturesque ; and in the modern portion of the 
city a restaurant or two where English is spo- 
ken in halting fashion by very pretty dark- 
skinned girls, and you may satisfy, if not your 
appetite, perhaps a long-standing curiosity re- 
garding tortillas, and frijoles, and chili con 
came. As for tamales, they are, as with us, a 
matter of curbstone speculation. Seiiores, 
seiioras, and se nor it as are plentifully encoun- 
93 




tered upon the streets, but are not in gen- 
eral distinguished by any peculiarity of attire. 
Upon the borders of the city one finds more 
vivid types, and there the jacal, a poor mud- 
hovel thatched with straw, is not quite extinct. 
The words Spanish and Mexican are commonly 
used in California to distinguish a racial differ- 
ence. Not a few of the Spanish soldiery and 
colonists originally took wives from among the 
native Indians. Their offspring has had its 
charms for later comers of still other races, and 
a complexity of mixture has resulted. The 
term Mexican is generally understood to apply 
to this amalgamation, those of pure Castilian 
descent preferring to be known as Spanish. 
The latter, numerically a small class, represent 
high types, and the persistency of the old strain 
is such that the poorest Mexican is to a certain 
manner born. He wears a contented mien, as 
if his Diogenes-tub and his imperceptible larder 
were regal possessions, and he does not easily 
part with dignity and self-respect. 




94 



The existence of these descendants of the 
Conquerors side by side with the exponents of 
the new regime is one of the charms of Los 
Angeles. It has others in historic vein. After its 
first overland connection with the East, by-way 
of the Santa Fe Trail, it rapidly took on the 
character of a wild border-town; the influx of 
adventurers and the stimulation of an unwonted 
commerce transforming the Spanish idyl into a 
motley scene of remunerative trade, abandoned 
carousal and desperate personal conflict. Its 
romantic career of progress and amelioration 
to its present enviable estate is marked by 
monuments that still endure. Fremont the 
Pathfinder here first raised the stars and stripes 
in 1846, and his after residence as governor of 
the state is well preserved. And Winfield Scott 
Hancock, as a young captain of the army, had 
quarters in this historic town. 

In modern interest it stands for a type of the 
material development that belongs to our day. 
In i860 it numbered 4,500 inhabitants; in 1880, 
11,000; in 1890, 50,000; in 1897, more than 100,- 
000. Surrounded by hundreds of cultivated 
farms, whose varied products form the basis 
of its phenomenal activity and prosperity, it is 
a really great city. It is well paved, well 
lighted, and abundantly served by intramural 
railways. It has parks of extraordinary beauty, 
and avenues shaded by the eucalyptus and the 
pepper, that most esthetic of trees. Outside 
the immediate thoroughfares of trade the 
95 



streets are bordered by attractive homes, 
fronted by grounds set with palm and orange 
and cypress, and blooming with flowers 
throughout the year. It is backed by the 
mountains that are always present in a Cali- 
fornia landscape, and fifteen miles away lies 
a vista of the sea, dotted with island-peaks. 




PASADENA. 

Just outside the limits of Los Angeles, inti- 
mately connected by railway and street-car 
lines, is Pasadena. For the origin of the name 
you may choose between the imputed Indian 
signification. Crown of the Valley, and a cor- 
ruption of the Spanish Paso de Eden (Thresh- 
old of Eden). It is in any event the crown of 
that Eden, the San Gabriel Valley, which nes- 
tles warmly in its groves and rose-bowers be- 
low lofty bulwarks tipped with snow. Here an 
Eastern multitude makes regular winter home 
in modest cottage or imposing mansion. Every 
fruit and flower and every ornamental tree and 
shrub known to Southern California is repre- 
sented in the elaborate grounds of this little 
realm. It is a playground of 
wealth, a Nob Hill of Paradise, 
blessed home of happy men and 
women and children who prefer 
this to vaunted foreign lands. 
The extensive Baldwin Ranch lies 
near at hand, with its great vine- 
yards, orchards, wineries, and 
horse-training grounds. 
96 






^B>^-.. 




■" i^' m 







Then there is Mount Lowe. 



MOUNT LOWE. 



At Altadena, four miles north of Pasadena, 
two railways connect with an electric line which 
leads to Rubio Canon, two and a half miles 
distant. There, from an altitude of 2,200 feet, 
the Cable Incline conveys visitors to the summit 
of Echo Mountain, nearly 1,400 feet higher. 
From this point, where will be found a charm- 
ing hotel and an observatory already somewhat 
famous for astronomical discoveries, radiate 
many miles of bridle-paths, and another elec- 
tric railway extends to still loftier heights at 
the Alpine Tavern, nearly a mile above the sea, 
and within a thousand feet of the objective 
summit, which is reached by bridle-path 
There is no more pleasurable mountain trip m 
the States than this, nor anywhere one more 
easy of accomplishment. Sufficiently elevated 
97 




above its surroundings to afford commanding 
views which stretch across wondrously fertile 
valleys to other ranges upon the one hand and 
to the coastwise islands of the Pacific upon the 
other, the total altitude is not great enough to 
distress those who are disordered by the thin 
air of more exalted summits, as in the Rockies. 
Among the manifold attractive features of Cal- 
ifornia the ascent of Mount Lowe worthily 
holds a conspicuous place. Its details are fully 
described in local publications and may be 
omitted here. 




RIVERSIDE AND VICINITY. 

A locality renowned for oranges, and or- 
anges, and still more oranges, white and odor- 
ous with the bloom of them, yellow with the 
sheen of them, and rich with the gains of them; 
culminating in a busy little city overhung by 
the accustomed mountain - battlements and 
pendant to a glorious avenue many miles in 




\ /., 




99 



L. •f C. 



length, lined with tall eucalyptus, drooping 
pepper and sprightly magnolia trees in straight 
lines far as eye can see, and broken only by 
short lateral driveways through palm, orange 
and cypress to mansion homes. The almost 
continuous citrus groves and vineyards of 
Riverside are the result of twenty years of 
co-operative effort, supplemented by some pre- 
ponderating advantages of location. 

It is the climax of the fair region that lies 
between Los Angeles and Redlands, through 
which, for the convenience of tourists, the 
trains of the Southern California Railway make 
circuit. The diagram of this circuit is a cross- 
belt or rough figure 8, whose shape, associated 
with the idea of a comprehensive and speedy 
journey, is responsible for a name greatly 
relished in a horsy state: the Kite-shaped 
Track. Starting from Los Angeles, nearly 
thirty communities of this famous region are 
thus traversed, the most celebrated of which are, 
in order, Rivera, Santa Fe Springs, La Mirada, 
FuUerton, Anaheim, Orange, Santa Ana, South 
Riverside, Riverside, Colton, San Bernardino, 
Arrowhead, East Highland, Mentone, Red- 
lands. North Ontario, Pomona, Monrovia, 
Santa Anita, and Pasadena. 



REDONDO AND SANTA MONICA, 

These are two popular beaches near Los An- 
geles, to both of which frequent trains are run 
daily. Equipped with superb hotels and fur- 
nished with the many minor attractions that 
congregate at holiday resorts, they are the 

lOO 



rl.T'^j 




Brighton and Manhattan beaches of this coast, 
enhanced by verdure and a softer clime, and a 
picturesquely varied shore. Both are locally 
celebrated among lovers of bathing, boating, 
and fishing. 

SANTA CATALINA ISLAND. 

Twenty miles off the coast it rises, like 
Capri, from the sea, a many-peaked mountain- 
cap, varying in width from half a mile to nine 
miles, and more than twenty long. Its bold 
cliff shores are broken by occasional pockets 
rimmed by a semicircular beach of sand. The 
most famous of these is Avalon, quite the most 
frequented camping ground of Southern Cali- 
fornia. In midsummer its two hotels are filled 
to overflowing, and in the hundreds of tents 
clustered by "the water's edge thousands of 
pleasure-seekers are gathered in the height of 
the season. Summer is the period of Santa 
Catalina's greatest animation, for then, as in 
other lands, comes vacation time. But there is 
even less variation of season than on the main- 
land, and the nights are soft and alluring, 
because the seaward-blowing mountain air is 
robbed of all its chill in passing over the equa- 
ble waters. Here after nightfall verandas 
and the beach are still thronged. The tiny 








harbor is filled with pleasure-craft of every 
description, from rowboats to commodious 
yachts, and hundreds of bathers disport in 
the placid element. Wonderful are the waters 
of Avalon, blue as a Mediterranean sky and 
astonishingly clear. Over the side of your 
skiff you may gaze down through a hundred 
feet of transparency to where emerald weeds 
wave and myriad fishes, blue and brown and 
flaming red, swim over pebble and shell. Or, 
climbing the overhanging cliffs, you gain the 
fish-eagle's view of the life that teems in water- 
depths, and looking down half a thousand feet 
upon the fisherman in his boat see the bright- 
hued fishes flashing far beneath him. He seems 
to hang suspended in the sky. 

Notable fishing is to be had. The barracuda 
is plentiful ; likewise the yellow-tail, or sea- 
salmon, also generally taken by trolling, and 
frequently tipping a truthful scale at fifty 
pounds. Sea-bass fishing is the most famous 
sport here, and probably the most exciting 
known anywhere to the hand-fisherman. This 
fish is commonly taken, and in weight ranges 

I02 




I03 



from 200 to 400 pounds. The fislierman who 
hooks one is' frequently dragged in his skiff for 
several miles, and finds himself nearly as much 
exhausted as the fish when it finally comes to 



Perhaps the greatest novelty of a trip to 
Santa Catalina, for most travelers, is the great 
number of flying fish that inhabit its waters. 
At only a few miles' distance from the main- 
land they begin to leap from beneath the bows 
of the steamer, singly, by twos and by half- 
dozens, until one wearies of counting, and skim 
over the waves like so many swallows. The 
length of flight of which this poetical fish is 
capable proves usually a surprise, for in spite 
of its abundance off the Southern California 
coast its precise character is none too gener- 
ally known. In size, form and color it may 
be roughly compared to the mackerel. Its 
"wings" are muscular fins whose spines are 
connected by a light but strong membrane, 
and are four in number. The hindermost pair 
are quite small, mere butterfly-wings of stout 
fiber; the foremost pair attain a length of seven 
or eight inches, and when extended are two 
inches or more in breadth. Breaking from the 
water at a high rate of speed, but at a very low 
angle, the flying-fish extends these wing- 
like fins and holds them rigid, like the 
set wings of a soaring hawk. With the 
lower flange of its deeply forked tail, 
which at first drags lightly, it sculls with 
convulsive wriggle of the whole 
body that gives it the 
casual appearance of 
104 




actually winging its way. The additional im- 
pulse thus acquired lifts it entirely from the 
water, over whose surface it then scales with- 
out further effort for a long distance, until, 
losing in momentum and in the sustaining 
pressure of the air beneath its outstretched 
fins, it again touches the water, either to 
abruptly disappear or by renewed sculling to 
prolong its flight. Often it remains above the 
waves until the eye can no longer distinguish 
its course in the distance. 

In the less-frequented portions of the island 
the wild goat is still common. But some few 
years ago a party of hunters, better armed than 
educated, wrought havoc with the domestic 
sheep that are pastured there; and now if you 
wish to hunt the goat you must first procure a 
permit, and to obtain that you must adduce 
evidence of your ability to tell the one from the 
other upon sight. This precautionary measure 
tends to the preservation of both sheep and 
goat, and the real sportsman as well as the 
herdsman is benefited thereby. 

Santa Catalina is reached by steamer from 
San Pedro, connecting with trains from Los 
Angeles. The exhilarating ocean-ride and the 
unique pleasures of the island can not be too 
strongly commended. 

SANTA BARBARA. 

Saint Barbara is, in Spain, the patroness of 
gunpowder and coast-defenses, and the invoca- 
tion of her name seems to have occurred in the 
light of a desirable precaution to the founder 
of this mission, who was so fond of building by 
105 




io6 



the sea; although, hke one of our own heroes, 
who supplemented his trust in Providence by 
protecting his ammunition from the rain, he 
kept here, as at a number of other points, a 
garrison of soldiers and a few small cannon. 

The place was long known the world over as 
" The American Mentone," because in seeking 
a term to convey its characteristics some com- 
parison with celebrated resorts of Europe was 
thought necessary and this particular com- 
parison most fitting. Such definition is no 
longer required. Santa Barbara is a name that 
now everywhere evokes the soft picture of a 
rose-buried spot, more than a village, less than a 
city, rising gently from the sea-rim by way of 
shaded avenue and plaza to the foot of the gray 
Santa Ynez Mountains, above whose peaks the 
condor loves to soar; where, when with us the 
winter winds are most bitter and ice and snow 
work a wicked will , every year they hold a riotous 
carnival of flowers, a unique Arcadian holiday 
of triumph. And behind all that lies an end- 
less variety of winsomeness. Not idly does the 
bright stingless air lure one to seek a new 
pleasure for each succeeding day. The fiat 
beach is broken by rocky points where the 
surf spouts in white columns with deafening 
roar, and above it lies a long mesa, dotted with 
live-oaks, that looks down upon the little dream- 
ing mission city and far oceanward; and on the 
other hand the mountain-slopes beckon to 
innumerable glens, and, when the rains have 
come, to broad hillsides of green and banks of 
blossom. There are long level drives by the 
shore, and up the prolific valley to famous 
107 



orchard-ranches; and Montecito, a fairyland of 
homes, is close at hand. 

Four of the Channel Islands lie opposite Santa 
Barbara: Anacapa, Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa, and 
San Miguel. The last three are only less at- 
tractive by nature than Santa Catalina, of 
which mention was made in its place, and al- 
though equal facilities do not exist for the tour- 
ist, many persons find their way there by means 
of fishing boats, which frequently leave Santa 
Barbara for the island fishing grounds. These 
islands, now permanently inhabited only by 
sheep-herders who tend flocks of many thou- 
sands, were once populated by a primitive peo- 
ple whose burial mounds, as yet only partly ex- 
humed by casual visitors, are rich in archaeo- 
logical treasures. 

Santa Barbara lies northwest from Los An- 
geles, on a branch of the Southern Pacific 
Railroad. It is the only one of the great resorts 
of Southern California not located upon the 
Santa Fe Route. 

OSTRICH-FARMING. 

At Coronado, Santa Monica, South Pasadena, 
and two or three other points are exhibited 
troops of ostriches confined in paddocks. They 
are generally regarded as a mere curiosity by the 
visitor, but really represent an established Cali- 
fornia industry. The original farm lies on the 
border of the town of Fallbrook, a dozen miles 
northeast from Oceanside, beyond the poetic 
Mission San Luis Rey, through whose incom- 
parable valley the stage-road leads. Here, 
where he roams with scores of his fellows over a 
io8 




quarter-section of hill and dale, the ostrich ceases 
to be exotic. He is at home, and his habits and 
personality become an easy and entertaining 
study. This Fallbrook ostrich-farm has been in 
operation since 1883, the locality having been 
found to offer conditions closely resembling that 
portion of South Africa in which ostrich-farming 
has so long been a source of wealth. Breeding 
has been carried on until it appears to have been 
established that a California-bred ostrich is in 
every respect the equal of the imported African. 
There are about one hundred ostriches on this 
ranch, many having been sold, and others being 
absent on exhibition. Every phase of this re- 
markable bird, which in maturity yields every 
eight months 200 of those costly plumes that 
are coveted by maids and dames, and all the 
novelties of its manipulation, are exhibited 
upon a large scale. 

WINTER SPORTS. 

Where out-of-door life is the rule, there being 
neither frost nor chill throughout the day , rec- 
reation becomes a matter of pure selection, 
unhampered by any climatic prohibition out- 
side the relatively infrequent rainstorm. A 
few enthusiasts make a point of taking a daily 
dip in the surf, but the practice does not reach 
the proportions of a popular pastime in mid-win- 
ter. Cross country riding 
finds then its perfect sea- 
son, the whole land being 
transformed into a gar- 
den, over enough of which 
the horseman is free to 
wander. Happy must 
109 





he be who knows a purer sport than to gallop, 
either singly or with comrades, in fragrant 
morning air over a fresh sod spangled with 
poppy, violet, forget-me-not, larkspur and 
alfileria; bursting through dense thickets of 
lilac and mustard to cross an intervening 
highway; dipping to verdant meadow vales; 
skirting orchards heavy with fruit, and mount- 
ing tree-capped knolls that look off to glim- 
mers of sea between the slopes of the hills. 
Coaching has its season then, as well, and the 
horn of the tallyho is frequently heard. For 
such as like to trifle with the snows from which 
they have fled, the foothills are at hand, ser- 
ried with tall firs in scattering growths or dense 
shadowy jungles, topping canons where the 
wagon-trail crosses and recrosses a stream by 
pleasant fords, and the crested mountain-quail 
skulks over the ridge above one's head. There 
may be had climbing to suit every taste, touch- 
ing extremes of chaotic tangle of chaparral 
and crag. There are cliffs over which the 
clear mountain-water tumbles sheer to great 
depths; notches through which the distant 
cones of the highest peaks of the mother 
range may be seen in whitest ermine, huge 
pines dotting their drifts like petty clumps of 
weed. Underfoot, too, on the northerly slopes 
is snow, just over the ridge from where the 
sun is as warm and the air as gentle as in the 
valley, save only the faintest sense of added 
vigor and rarefaction. So near do these ex- 
tremes lie, and yet so effectually separated, you 
may thrust into the mouth of a snow-man a 
rose broken from the bush an hour or two 



before, and pelt him with oranges plucked at 
the very mouth of the canon. And one who is 
not too susceptible may comfortably linger un- 
til the sun has set, and above the lower dusky 
peaks the loftier ones glow rose-pink in the 
light of its aftershine, until the moon lights 
the fissures of the canon with a ghostly 
radiance against which the black shadows of 
the cliffs fall like ink-blots. 

If barracuda, Spanish mackerel, yellow-tail or 
sea-bass should not be hungry, trout are plenti- 
ful in the mountain-streams. Mountain and 
valley quail, and snipe, furnish the most reli- 
able sport for the average gunner. Good shots 
do not consider it a great feat to bring a hun- 
dred quail to bag in a day's outing. Ducks and 
geese are innumerable. Whole vast meadows 
are sometimes whitened with snow-geese, like 
a field with daisies, and the air above is filled 
with flying thousands. Deer are easily found 
by those who know how to hunt them, and 
mountain-lions and cinnamon bear are not in- 
frequently shot in the hills. 

The grizzly was once exceedingly common. 
One of the great sports of the old mission days 
was to hunt the grizzly on horseback with the 
riata for sole weapon, and it is of record that 
in a single neighborhood thirty or forty of these 
formidable brutes were sometimes captured in 
a night by roping, precisely as a modern cow- 
boy ropes a steer; the secret of the sportsmen's 
immunity lying in the fact that the bear was 
almost simultaneously lassoed from different 
sides and in that manner rigidly pinioned. But 
Ursus horribilis has long since retreated to 



deep solitudes, where his occasional pursirers, 
far from approaching him with a rawhide 
noose, go armed with heavy repeating-rifles, 
and even thus equipped are not eager to en- 
counter him at very close range. 

Cricket is ' naturally a favorite diversion 
among the many young Englishmen who have 
located upon ranches; and yachting and polo 
do not want for devotees. 




/^AH'l' 



'^VH^'''^ 



NORTHERN CALIFORNIA. 




[Y Northern California is commonly 
meant all that portion north of the six 
lowermost counties. The distinction 
has yet no political significance, but 
is generally recognized. To be geographically 
exact, the present stage is mainly confined to 
the middle of the state. 

Upon quitting Los Angeles a gradual relapse 
into aridity soon becomes apparent, until again 
you are fairly on a desert over whose flat dry 
sands the water mirage loves to hover, although 
it no longer mocks parched perishing caravans 
as in former days. Railroads have robbed 
these wastes of their terror, and oases here and 
there mark the homes of irrepressible settlers. 
This barren quickly gives place to the Teha- 
chapi Pass, a scenic maze of detours 
and involutions leading down into vast 
irrigated lands in the fertile valley of 
the San Joaquin. At Berenda a short 
branch diverges eastward to Ray- 
mond, from which point stages 
ply to the renowned valley of the 
113 





Sierra Nevada Range, whose majestic beauty 
is second only to that of the Grand Canon of 
the Colorado. 

All the world has heard of the Yosemite, of 
its cataract that plunges 1,500 feet sheer in 
one of its three downward leaps, of its thread- 
like cascade that bends to the wind through 
900 feet of descent, of its colossal domes, 
spires and arches of bare granite contrasted 
with soft tones of green forest and silver lake ; 
and of the Big Trees of the Mariposa Grove, 
where more than three hundred specimens of 
the Sequoia gigantea are scattered over an 
area of several thousand acres. This is the 
regular approach to those scenes, of which the 
barest mention should surely suffice, their 
description having passed into the literature of 
every language. 

Beyond Berenda widening meadows slope to 
a placid inlet of the sea, whose winding shore 
leads to Oakland Pier. Here a ferry crosses 
the bay to the city of San Francisco. 

Numberless matters of interest in this region, 
more or less widely known and certain to be 
brought to the attention of the traveler en 
route, must be omitted from the present ac- 
count. The wise traveler, blessed with leisure, 
will stop by the way and look about him. Here 
is a state whose seaboard is as long 
..^..^ as that which stretches from Massa- 
chusetts to Georgia, whose mountains 
are overtopped in North America only 
by those of Alaska, whose mines have 
astonished the world, whose wealth of 
114 



cattle and sheep and horses is nearly half as 
great as that of its mines, whose vales have 
wrought revelation in gardening and fruit- 
culture, and whose natural prodigies and land- 
scape marvels are innumerable. But San Fran- 
cisco, the region of the Santa Clara Valley, and 
Lake Tahoe, which overlaps the border-line of 
Nevada, will be permitted to monopolize the 
remainder of the space allotted to California. 



SAN FRANCISCO. 

The bay of San Francisco is almost com- 
pletely encircled by land. The Golden Gate is 
the tideway, a narrow passage between the ex- 
tremities of two peninsulars, upon the point of 
the southernmost of which the city stands. 

Here, too, the Franciscan mission -builders 
were first upon the field, arid the present name 
is a curtailment of Mission de los Dolores de 
Niiestro Padre Sa7i Francisco de A sis, an 
appellation commemiorative of the sorrows of 
the originator of the order. The Mission 
Dolores, founded in 1776, is still preserved with 
its little campo santo of the dead, a poor un- 
sightly strangled thing, structurally unimpos- 
ing and wholly wanting in the poetic atmos- 
phere of semi-solitude that envelopes the 
missions of Southern California. A modern 
cathedral overshadows it, and shops and 
dwellings jostle it. So nearly, in forty years, 
has all trace of the preceding three-quarters of 
a century been obliterated. Changed from a 
IIS 




.^ye^r^/^- 



Spanish to a Mexican province early in the 
century, then promptly stripped of the treas- 
ures that had been accumulated by monkish 
administration, and subsequently ceded to the 
United States, California had on the whole a 
dreamy, quiet life until that famous nugget 
was found in 184S. Then followed the era of 
the Argonauts, seekers of the golden fleece, 
who flocked by the thousand from Eastern 
towns and cities by way of the plains, the 
Isthmus, and the Cape to dig in the gravel- 
beds; lawless adventurers in their train. San 
Francisco practically dates from that period. 
Its story is a wild one, a working-out of order 
and stable commercial prosperity through chap- 
ters that treat of feverish gold-crazy mobs, of 
rapine grappled by the vigilance committee, of 
insurrection crushed by military force. And 
in this prosperity, oddly enough, the produc- 
tion of gold has been superseded in impor- 
tance by other resources; for although Califor- 
nia annually yields more precious metal than 
any other state, the yearly value of its marketed 
cattle, wool, cereals, roots, fruits, sugar and 
wines is twice as great, and forms the real 
commercial basis of the 
great city of the Pacific 
Coast, where the rail- 
roads of a continent and 
the fleets of two oceans 
clasp hands and complete 
the circuit of the globe. 
116 





A STREET IN CHINATOWN. 
117 




As if it were fearful of being hid, it is set 
upon not one but a score of hills, overlooking 
land and sea. As you near it, by way of Oak- 
land Ferry, it appears to be built in terraced 
rows rising steeply from the water-front; but 
that is a bit of foreshortening. It is still rather 
motley in architecture. Low frame buildings 
were at first the rule, partly because they were 
sufficient to the climate and partly in deference 
to traditions of earthquake; but at length 
builders ventured taller structures, of brick and 
stone, and now every year many lofty elegant 
buildings are added. Certainly no one of them 
has been shaken down as yet, and possibly the 
architects have authority for believing that 
even Vulcan is superannuated and in his sec- 
ond childhood is appeased with a rattle. 

It is a city of fair aspect, undulating from 
the water's edge, where children play upon the 
broad sands and sea-lions clamber over jutting 
rocks, to heights of nearly a thousand feet. 
Overlooking the sands and the seal-rocks from 
a considerable bluff is the Cliff House resort, 
and towering above that is the magnificent sky- 
battlement known as Sutro Heights— a private 
property open to the public and embellished by 
landscape gardens and statuary. Other sights 
and scenes are the Golden Gate, the park of the 
same name — a thousand acres of familiar and 
rare trees, shrubs and flowers — the largest 
mint in the world, not a few magnificent public 
buildings, innumerable phases of active com- 
merce, and the contrasting life of races repre- 
senting nearly every nation of the world. 
ii8 



CHINATOWN. 

A few steps from your hotel, at the turn of a 
corner, you come at once upon the city of the 
Chinese. It is night, and under the soft glow 
of paper lanterns and through the gloom of un- 
lighted alleys weaves an oriental throng. Po- 
licemen doubtless stand upon a corner here and 
there, and small parties of tourists pick their 
way under lead of professional guides; the re- 
maining thousands are Celestials all. The 
scene is of the Chinaman at home, very John, 
restored to authenticity of type by the counte- 
nance of numbers; and so in the twinkling of 
an eye you become a foreigner in your own 
land, a tolerated guest in a fantastic realm 
whose chief apparent hold upon reality is its 
substratum of genuine wickedness. It is a gro- 
tesque jumble, a panopticon of peepshows; 
women shoemakers huddled in diminutive 
rooms; barbers with marvelous tackle shaving 
heads and chins, and cleaning ears and eye- 
balls, while their patrons sit in the constrained 
attitude of a victim, meekly holding the tray; 
clerks, armed with a long pointed stick dipped 
in ink, soberly making pictures of variant spi- 
ders in perpendicular rows; apothecaries ex- 
pounding the medicinal virtues of desiccated 
toad and snake; gold-workers making bracelets 
of the precious metal to be welded about the 
arm of him who dares not trust his hoard to an- 
other's keep; restaurateurs serving really pala- 
table conserves, with pots of delectable tea; 
shopkeepers vending strange foreign fruits and 
dubious edibles plucked from the depths of 
nightmare; merchants displaying infinitude of 
119 




curious trinkets and elaborate costly wares; 
worshipers and readers of the book of fate in 
rich temples niched with uncouth deities; con- 
ventional actors playing interminable histri- 
onics to respectful and appreciative auditors; 
gamblers stoically venturing desperate games 
of chance with cards and dominoes; opium- 
smokers stretched upon their bunks in a hot 
atmosphere heavy with sickening fumes; lepers 
dependent upon occasional alms flung by a 
hand that avoids the contamination of contact; 
female chattels, still fair and innocent of face 
despite unutterable wrongs, yet no whit above 
the level of their deep damnation — such is the 
Chinatown one brings away in lasting memory 
after three hours of peering, entering, ascend- 
ing, descending, crossing and delving. A very 
orderly and quiet community, withal, for the 
Mongolian is not commonly an obstreperous 
individual, and his vices are not of the kind 
that inflame to deeds of violence. He knows 
no more convivial bowl than a cup of tea. If he 
quits the gaming-table penniless, it is with a 
smile of patient melancholy. And his dens of 
deepest horror are silent as enchanted halls. 

All except its innermost domestic life maybe 
inspected by the curious. The guides are dis- 
creet, and do not include the lowest spectacles 
except upon request, although it is equally true 
that very many visitors, regarding the entire 
experience as one of the conventional sights of 
travel, go fortified with especial hardihood and 
release their conductor from considerations of 
delicacy. 

The joss-houses, or temples, are hung with 
1 20 




ponderous gilded carvings, with costly draperies 
and rich machinery of worship. The deities are 
fearful conceptions, ferocious of countenance, 
bristling with hair and decked with tinseled 
robes. A tiny vestal-flame burns dimly in a 
corner, and near it stands a huge gong. An 
attendant strikes this gong vociferously to 
arouse the god, and then prostrates himself be- 
fore the altar, making three salaams. A couple 
of short billets, half round, are then tossed into 
the air to bode good or ill luck to you according 
as they fall upon the one or the other side. A 
good augury having been secured by dint of 
persistent tossing, a quiverful of joss-sticks is 
next taken in hand and dextrously shaken until 
three have fallen to the floor. The sticks are 
numbered, and correspond to paragraphs in a 
fate book that is next resorted to, and you are 
ultimately informed that you will live for forty 
years to come, that you will marry within two 
years, and, if your sex and air seem to counten- 
ance such a venture, that you wall shortly make 
enormous winnings at poker. Whatever of 
genuine solemnity may cloak the Heathen Chi- 
nee in his own relations to his bewhiskered 
deities, he undoubtedly tips the wink to them 
when the temple is invaded by itinerant sight- 
seers. The smooth, spectacled interpreter of 
destinies pays $5,000 a year for the privilege of 
purveying such mummeries, and hardly 
can the Heathen Chinee himself repress a 
twinkle of humor at the termination of a 
scene in which he so easily comes off best, 
having fairly outdone his Caucasian critic 
in cynicism, and for a price. 




CHINESE RESTAURANT. 
12-^1 



In the theater he will be found, perhaps con- 
trary to expectation, to take a serious view of 
art. You are conducted by a tortuous under- 
ground passage of successive step-ladders and 
narrow ways, past innumerable bunk-rooms 
of opium-smokers, to the stage itself, where 
your entrance creates no disturbance. The 
Chinese stage is peculiar in that while the act- 
ors are outnumbered ten to one by supernum- 
eraries, musicians and Caucasian visitors, they 
monopolize the intellectual recognition of the 
audience. The men who, hat on head, pack 
the pit, and the women who throng the two 
galleries, divided into respectable and unre- 
spectable by a rigid meridian, have been edu- 
cated to a view of the drama which is hardly to 
be ridiculed by nations that admit the concert 
and the oratorio. The Chinese simply need 
less ocular illusion than we in the theater, and 
perhaps those of us who are familiar with the 
grotesque devices by which our own stage- 
veneer is wrought perform no less an intel- 
lectual feat than they. Their actors are indeed 
richly costumed, and, women not being per- 
mitted upon the stage, the youths who play 
female roles are carefully made up for their 
parts; and one and all they endeavor to imper- 
sonate. Almost no other illusion is considered 
necessary. The stage manager and his assist- 
ants now and then erect a small background 
suggestive of environment, and the province of 
the orchestra is to accentuate emotion — in 
which heaven knows they attain no Small de- 
gree of success. It is highly conventionalized 
drama, in which any kind of incongruity may 
124 




BALCONY OF JOSS-HOUSE. 
125 



elbow the players provided it does not confuse 
the mind by actually intervening between them 
and the audience. The plays are largely his- 
torical, or at least legendary, and vary in 
length from six or eight hours to a serial of 
many consecutive nights' duration. There are 
stars whose celebrity packs the house to the 
limit of standing-room, and there are the same 
strained silent attention and quick rippling re- 
sponse to witty passages that mark our own 
playhouses; but such demonstrative applause 
as the clapping of hands and the stamping of 
feet is unknown. The Chinese theater-goer 
would as soon think of so testifying enjoyment 
of a good book in the quiet of his home. But as 
for the orchestra, let some other write its justifi- 
cation. Such a banging of cymbals, and ham- 
mering of gongs, and monotonous squealing of 
stringed instruments in unrememberable minor 
intervals almost transcends belief. Without 
visible leader, and unmarked by any discover- 
able rhythm, it is nevertheless characterized by 
unanimity of attack and termination, as well as 
enthusiasm of execution, and historians of 
music are authority for the statement that it is 
based upon an established scale and a scientific 
theory. Be that as it may, it is a thing of 
terror first to greet the ear on approach , last to 
quit it in departure, and may be counted upon 
for visitation in dreams that follow indigestion. 
The secret society known as the Highbinders 
was created two and a half centuries ago in 
China by a band of devoted patriots, and had 
degenerated into an organization employed to 
further the ends of avarice and revenge long 
126 



before it was transplanted to this country. Re- 
lieved of the espionage that had in some meas- 
ure controlled it at home, and easily able to 
evade a police unfamiliar with the Chinese 
tongue, it grew in numbers and power with 
great rapidity. The greater portion of the peo- 
ple of Chinatown has always been honestly in- 
dustrious and law abiding, but the society re- 
warded hostility by persecution, ruin, and often 
death. Merchants were laid under tribute, and 
every form of industry in the community that 
was not directly protected by membership in 
the society was compelled to yield its quota of 
revenue. Vice was fostered, and courts of law 
were so corrupted by intimidation or bribery of 
witnesses that it was next to impossible to con- 
vict a Highbinder of any criminal offense. A 
climax of terror was reached that at last con- 
vulsed the environing city, and by the pure ef- 
frontery of autocratic power the society itself 
precipitated its downfall. A peremptory word 
was given to the police, and a scene ensued 
which the astonished Celestials were forced 
to accept as a practical termination of their 
bloody drama; a small epic of civilization 
intent on the elevation of heathendom, no in- 
considerable portion of which in a short space 
was blown skyhigh. The Highbinders were 
scattered, many imprisoned or executed, innu- 
merable dives emptied, temples and secret 
council -rooms stripped bare, and the society in 
effect undone. Yet still, for one who has 
viewed the lowest depths of the Chinatown of 
to-day, the name will long revive an uncher- 
ished memory of two typical faces, outlined 
127 



upon a background of nether flame. One is the 
face of a young woman who, in a cell far under- 
ground, leans against a high couch in a man- 
ner half-wanton, half-indifferent, and chants an 
unintelligible barbaric strain. The other is 
that of her owner, needing only a hangman's 
knot beneath the ear to complete a wholly sat- 
isfactory presentment of irredeemable deprav- 
ity. And that is why one quits the endless 
novelties of the peepshow without regret, and 
draws a breath of relief upon regaining the fa- 
miliar streets of civilization. 

SANTA CLARA VALLEY. 

Below the junction of San Francisco's penin- 
sular with the main land the Santa Clara Val- 
ley stretches southward between the coast and 
Santa Cruz ranges. Along this valley lies the 
way to San Jose and the coast resorts of Santa 
Cruz and Monterey, past intermediate points 
of celebrity. 

Palo Alto is the site of the Stanford Univer- 
sity, where in a campus of 8,000 acres, an ar- 
boretum to which every clime has liberally con- 
tributed, stands this magnificent memorial of a 
cherished son. The buildings are conceived in 
the style of mission architecture — low struc- 
tures connected by an arcade surrounding an 
immense inner court, with plain thick walls, 
arches and columns, built of buff sandstone 
and roofed with red tiles. Richly endowed, 
this university is broadly and ambitiously 
planned, and is open to both sexes in all de- 
partments. 

Hard by, at Menlo Park, is the Stanford horse 
breeding and training establishment, where 
128 




.^«^-^>^ 
/i/^ 



hundreds of thoroughbreds are carefully tended 
in paddock and stable and daily trained. Even 
one who is not a lover of horses, if such a person 
exists, can not fail to find entertainment here, 
where daily every phase of equine training is 
exhibited from the kindergarten where toddling 
colts are taught the habit of the track to the 
open course where famous racers are speeded. 

Perhaps there is not, in the whole of Northern 
California, a town more attractively environed 
than San Jose. It lies in the heart of the val- 
ley, protected by mountain- walls from every 
wandering asperity of land or sea, a clean, regu- 
larly platted city, reaching off through avenues 
of pine and of eucalyptus, and through or- 
chards and vineyards, to pretty forest slopes 
where roads climb past rock, glen and rivulet 
to fair, commanding heights. The immediate 
neighborhood is the center of prune production, 
and every year exports great quantities of 
berries, fruits and wines. The largest seed- 
farms and the largest herd of short-horned 
cattle in the world are here. 

Twenty-six miles east from San Jose is Mount 
Hamilton, upon whose summit the white wall 
of the Lick Observatory is plainly visible at 
that distance. This observatory has already be- 
come celebrated for the 
discovery of Jupiter's 
fifth satellite, and gives 
promise of affording 
man)^ another astronom- 
ical sensation in time to 
come. Visitors are per- 
mitted to look through 
129 




the great telescope one night in the week, and 
in the intervals a smaller glass sufficiently pow- 
erful to yield a good view of the planets in the 
broad sunlight of midday is devoted to their 
entertainment. It is reached by stage from 
San Jose, the round trip being made daily. 
Aside from the attraction of the famous sky- 
glass, supplanted by the multitudinous and 
elaborate mechanisms of the observatory, the 
ride through the mountains to Mount Hamilton 
more than compensates the small fatigue of the 
journey. There are backward glimpses of the 
beautiful valley, and a changing panorama of 
the Sierra, the road making loops and turns in 
the shadow of live oaks on the brink of pro- 
found crater-like depressions. 

Santa Cruz is a popular resort by the sea, 
possessing picturesque rocks and a fine back- 
ground of the mountains that bear its name. 
Near at hand is a much-visited grove of Big 
Trees, the approach to which leads through oak 
and fir, past cailons fringed with madrona and 
manzanita, and fern and flower. 

Monterey was the old capital of California in 
the earliest period of Spanish rule. Here the 
forest crowds upon the sea and mingles its odor 
of balm with that of the brine. The beach 
that divides them is broken by cliffs where the 
cypress finds footing to flaunt its rugged 
boughs above the spray of the waves, and in the 
gentle air of a perfect climate the wild flowers 
hold almost perpetual carnival. Upon such a 
foundation the Hotel del Monte, with its vast 
parks of lawn and garden and driveway, cov- 
erifig many hundred acres, is set, all its 
130 



magnificence lending really less than it owes to 
the infinite charm of Monterey. Its fame has 
spread through every civilized land, and Eu- 
ropean as well as American visitors make up its 
throng. Here, as elsewhere upon the coast, 
foreign travelers are seen most in that season 
when the extraordinary equability of winter 
allures them by contrast with their native en- 
vironment, but the Calif ornian knows its sum- 
mer aspect to be no less winsome ; and so, from 
the year's beginning to its end, there is one 
long gala day at Monterey, its parks and 
beaches and forests animated by wealthy and 
fashionable pleasure-seekers. The Del Monte 
is located in a scattering grove of 200 acres, a 
little east from the town, and for lavishness of 
luxury and splendor in construction and ac- 
cessory has perhaps no superior. Bathing, 
boating, camping and driving are the current 
out-of-door activities, and specific points of in- 
terest are the Carmel Mission, Pacific Grove, 
Moss Beach, Seal Rocks, Cypress Point and 
Point Pinos Lighthouse. The amount of yearly 
rainfall at Monterey is more than at San Diego 
and less than at Santa Barbara. The mean mid- 
summer temperature is the same, namely, 65°, 
but in winter the thermometer averages lower, 
the mean temperature of Januar}'- being 50° at 
Monterey, 56° at Santa Barbara, and 57° at San 
Diego. These figures compare most favorably 
with the records of European resorts, and the 
absence of humidity works a further ameliora- 
tion both in summer and winter, firmly estab- 
lishing the resorts of California as character- 
ized by the most equable climate known. 
132 



LAKE TAHOE. 

More than 6,000 feet above the sea, among 
mountains that rise from its edge to a further 
altitude of from 2,000 to 5,000 feet, and sur- 
rounded by the deep forest, this lake unites 
the highest poetic beauty with definite attrac- 
tions for the artist and the sportsman. It is 
twenty-five miles long and half as wide, and 
reaches a depth of 1,700 feet. Hotels and 
cottages sprinkle its shores, little steamers ply 
upon its silvery surface, and there are tents 
and boats of camping fishermen and hunters. 
Here to the aromatic odor of the forest come 
lovers of pure joys for comparative solitude in 
the heart of nature. In the adjacent wilder- 
ness there is game to tax the address of the 
bravest gunner, and mountain-streams shout 
in torrent through a thousand fierce tangles of 
woodland dear to artists and unprofessional 
lovers of un trammeled beauty; and from the 
mountain-tops one may look far out over the 
barriers that strive to secrete this exquisite spot 
from the outer world. Fragments of its loveli- 



ness have been copied 
many a camera, 
poets have sung 
of it, travelers 
have told of it in 
labored prose ; 
but Lake Tahoe 
eludes transla- 
tion. Have you 
ever chanced 
upon a spot 
where Nature, 



by many a brush and 




turning from gorgeous pigments and heroic can- 
vases in a swift softening mood, had spent the 
white heat of inspiration upon a picture in which 
was permitted neither asperity nor want of per- 
fect grace, a thing finely poised between gran- 
deur and gentleness, wood and water and 
mountain and sky, rhymed in every line and 
tone to a fine exaltation such as the Greek 
knew when he dreamed a statue out of the 
marble? Tahoe is of that category. It is 
reached by stage from Truckee, on the line 
of the Southern Pacific, our returning east- 
ward route from San Francisco, 




134 



VI. 




NEVADA AND UTAH. 

|EVADA formerly existed as part of 
the territory of Utah, and, having 
leaped into sudden significance with 
the discovery of silver sulphurets in 
was separately organized and admitted 
into the Union during the Civil War. Trap- 
pers were its pioneers in 1825, overland emi- 
grants crossed it as early as 1834, and the 
explorations of Fremont began nine years later. 
It is a land of silver and sage-brush and 
steaming mineral springs; of salt and borax and 
sulphur; of parallel mountain ranges, rolling 
plains and flat alkaline sands, of limpid fish- 
thronged lakes and brackish sink holes that 
suck the flow of its rivers. Its composition is 
endlessly diverse, and there is abundance of 
noble scenery, but this does not generally lie 
adjacent to the railway route. In its transit 
the tourist will not unlikely be aware of a few 
hours of monotony — the first and the last to be 
135 








encountered in the entire course of the journey. 
Reno, Winnemucca and Elko are the chief 
cities that will be seen, and Humboldt River 
is followed closely for the greater part of 
the distance across the state. Nevada, as 
everybody knows, means sjiowy. The name 
was derived from the range upon its western 
border, and was not suggested by any charac- 
teristic of the climate, which is dry and health- 
ful, and, save in extreme altitudes, notably 
temperate. 

Crossing the Utah line, and keeping well 
above the edge of the desolate barren noted on 
the maps as the Great Salt Lake Desert, you 
come quickly into view of the Great Salt Lake 
itself, whose shore is approximately followed for 
half its circumference upon the north and east. 
Between the eastern shore and the Wasatch 
136 



Range the southward-trending valley stretches 
for many miles. Ogden, Salt Lake City, Provo, 
Springville and numerous pretty Mormon vil- 
lages are scattered along the line, and there is 
a large body of fresh water known as Utah 
Lake, linked to the great salt inland sea by the 
Jordan River. America boasts no fairer or more 
fruitful valley than this. Beyond, the circular 
eastward sweep of the route passes Red Nar- 
rows, Soldier Summit, Castle Gate, Green 
River and the Book Cliffs, and leads through 
the noble valley of the Grand River to the Col- 
orado boundary at Utaline. 

Desert, broken by innumerable lovely oases; 
salt sea and fresh -water lake; monuments of an 
institution of world-wide notoriety, and its com- 
munities alternating or mingled with "Gentile" 
population; mountain passes, caiions, noble 
gateways, and memorable rock -formations and 
river-valleys — these are the distinguishing 
features of Utah. 



Focal point of converging railroads from the 
east and west, and nourished by many thousand 
acres of irrigated land immediately surround- 
ing, Ogden is the second city of Utah in im- 
portance. The Wasatch Mountains protect it 
upon the east and north, and form a background 



of exceeding beauty here as elsewhere. The 
attractions of its environs include lakes, springs, 
rivers and parks, and Ogden Carlon, a nine- 
mile stretch of rugged rock- fissures and roaring 
waters. 

SALT LAKE CITY. 

Here in 1S47 came Brigham Young and his 
band of Latter Day Saints, driven from the 
States by the unpopularity of their tenets and 
practice. The story of the Mormons is a tragic 
one, difficult reading for a dispassionate reader, 
like that of the Puritanic persecution of Quakers 
and reputed practitioners of witchcraft two cen- 
turies ago. It is true the Mormon offered an 
affront to the public sense of morality, but a later 
generation, that counts so many avowed adher- 
ents to the notion that even monogamous mar- 
riage is a failure, should have only commisera- 
tion for a sect committed to utter bankruptcy in 
that particular. In any event, abhorrence of 
polygamy can not serve as excuse for the cruel- 
ties visited upon the early Mormons by the mobs 
that despoiled, maltreated and murdered them. 
In this lies our disgrace, part sectional, part 
national, that their one offensive characteristic 
was counted a forfeiture of their every human 
right, and their defiance of a single law made 
pretext for the violation of twenty in their per- 
secution. They are familiar to the public mind 
almost solely in their character as polygamists 
138 




claiming sanction of divine authority; yet, al- 
though polygamy no longer exists in Utah, 
the Church of Latter Day Saints having for- 
mally renounced it, the name of Mormon still 
has power to awaken prejudice among those 
who know the sect only by repute. The aban- 
donment of this prejudice is demanded not by 
charity, but by common-sense. The patriarchal 
households of the pious old Jewish kings are 
not more utterly a thing of the past than are 
those of the Mormons, and stripped of them 
Mormonism contains nothing to offend in a 
country that pretends to tolerance in matters 
of religion. 

The putative author of the Book of Mormon 
was a prophet of that name. It purports to 
be an abridgment of the book of the prophet 
Ether, which narrated that the Jaredites came 
to America in the great dispersion that fol- 
lowed the confusion of tongues at Babel, and 
were destroyed for their degeneracy in the 
year 600 B. C. In the same year Lehi led a 
second exodus, from Jerusalem, which landed 
at Chili, from which point the populating of 
North America was again begun. Ether's 
book was discovered by this colony, which in 
course of time was divided into two factions, 
the Nephites and the Lamanites. The former 
were eventually exterminated by the latter, 
who relapsed into barbarism and became the 
ancestral stock of our native Indians. Mor- 
mon was a prophet of the Nephites, and to the 
abridgment of Ether's story added an account 
of the history of the second colony, and hid 
his own tablets where they were found by Jo- 
139 




140 



seph Smith and by him miraculously trans- 
lated. The basis of the religious teaching is 
Biblical; the exposition constitutes Latter Day 
sanctity. 

The followers of Young found the Salt Lake 
Valley a desert of unproductiveness, despite the 
beauty of its contour. They made it an unprece- 
dented oasis, a broad garden of lovely fertility. 
A band of pauper zealots, they camped upon 
a barren and compelled it to sustain them. 
They found inspiration in the striking topo- 
graphical resemblance between their Desert 
and Palestine, and gave the name Jordan to 
the little river that joined their two contrasting 
waters, as old Jordan joins the Sea of Tiberias 
with the Dead Sea. They chose a site for 
Zion, and in its center, in 1853, they laid the 
foundations of the Temple, which the predeter- 
mined forty years of building exactly brought 
to completion. And as the government was of 
the Church, so the Temple was regarded as 
the pivot of Zion. The ordinal numbers, com- 
bined with the four cardinal points, still serve 
to distinguish the different streets of the city, 
as clearly indicating the exact relation of each 
to the location of the great edifice. Second 
West Street, East Fifth South Street, and the 
like, are finger-posts that guide the stranger 
infallibly to the Mormon mecca. 

It was a curious reversion to the old patri- 
archal idea of life, foreign to the spirit of our 
time and so foredoomed to failure; but the 
dreamers had hard muscles and determined 
souls. They grubbed bushes, they dug ditches, 
they irrigated, they fought the grasshopper, 
141 




142 



they subsisted on the substance of things hoped 
for, enduring extremes of hunger and privation 
in the first years of their grapple with the desert. 
And by the time the reluctance of earth had 
been overcome and material prosperity had 
been won the westward flow of emigration had 
brought about the human conflict once more. 
The records of that conflict have been written 
by the accustomed partisan hands, but the plain 
truth is that w^hether we are Mormon, or Cath- 
olic, or Protestant, or Mohammedan, or Gentile 
pure and unalloyed, we are intolerant all; and 
when we lay hold upon an issue it is more than 
a meeting of Greeks, it is savage to savage, old 
Adam himself warring against himself in the 
persons of his common children. Mormonism 
was a dream of religious enthusiasm mixed with 
earthly dross, overthrown by dross of earth that 
invoked the name of religion. Yet the over- 
throw was plainly plotted by the higher powers, 
and the conquerors were in their employ. 

The distinguishing features of the sect, as 
now restricted, are not apparent to the casual 
traveler, to whom Zion is only a romantic and 
imposing relic of a day that has been outlived. 
But the organization still en- 
dures, and there is no reason to 
doubt that its distinction is 
vital enough in the sight of 
Mormons themselves, as it is to 
any clan or denomination. In- 
dividually they are esteemed 
and respected among the " Gen- 
tiles " that have invaded 
Lake City, 




and Brigham Young himself, in the fullness 
of his almost autocratic power, manifested 
many of the qualities that make great names in 
history. That he made scandalous misuse of 
that power is generally believed, and, however 
great he may have deemed the danger of his 
people, it is certain he rebelled against the 
Government of these United States; but he was 
essentially a great leader and a man of many 
broad and beneficent conceptions. As con- 
tractor he built hundreds of miles of the first 
transcontinental railroad, and built a connect- 
ing road nearly forty miles in length to place 
Salt Lake City in commercial intimacy with the 
outside world. The first telegraph line to span 
the Rockies was principally constructed by him 
as contractor. And it is remembered of him 
that he furnished a Mormon battalion to the 
Mexican War, and protected from Indian dep- 
redations the transportation of the United 
States mails through Utah at a time when Gov- 
ernment troops could not be spared for the serv- 
ice. The establishment of the Territory of 
Utah was the death knell of the State of Des- 
eret which he had founded, yet the President 
had enough confidence in his loyalty to appoint 
him its first governor. That he should in the 
unavoidable ultimate issue take j^ositive ground 
on the side of his peoj^le was to have been ex- 
pected of the Mormon leader. 

Young is the personification of the sect to the 
world at large, and his memory overhangs Salt 
Lake City, perpetuated in the broad private 
grounds with their high walls and imposing 
gateway, where so long he dwelt and where in 
144 



death he lies buried. And near at hand are the 
erstwhile palaces of his favorite wives, and 
miscellaneous structures that had religious and 
governmental uses in the singular day of his 
prime. 

GREAT SALT LAKE. 

Great Salt Lake has lost nineteen-twentieths 
of its ancient original dimensions, which still are 
traceable. Its area was once equal to one-half 
that of the present Territory. It now covers an 
extent of about 2,000 square miles, in which are 
included a dozen or more mountain-islands. 
Its waters are temperately warm and five times 
as salt as the ocean. The human body floats 
upon their surface with cork -like buoyancy, 
without the slightest sustaining effort. You 
may double your knees under you and recline 
upon it, like a cherub on a cloud, wnth head 
and shoulders protruding. With sun-umbrella 
and book you may idly float and read at pleas- 
ure, or safely take a nap upon the bosom of Salt 
Lake if you can contrive to maintain a suitable 
balance meanw^hile ; for you will find a marked 
disposition on the part of this brine to turn you 
face down, which position is anything but a 
pleasant pickle when unexpectedly assumed, for 
the membrane of eyes and nose and mouth is 
not on friendly terms with such saline bitterness. 
145 



-zT 




r-X 



The shore of the lake is a few miles distant 
from the city, and Garfield Beach, some eighteen 
miles away, is the most popular bathing-resort. 
Here a pavilion and whole streets and avenues 
of dressing rooms have been provided for the 
hundreds of bathers who every day in season 
flock to the lake. Everybody bathes, and the 
scene, novel and amusing by reason of the 
remarkable specific gravity of the water, differs 
from that of any other watering-place. The nat- 
ural aspect is full of soft beauty, not unlike that 
of the Southern California shore looking off to 
the coast islands of the Pacific, save that the 
semi-tropical vegetation is wanting. 

Salt Lake is a Dead Sea, bare of fish or fowl 
except for a minute and not numerous species 
of the former. There is said to be a Mormon 
tradition that in the time of their grasshopper 
plague an enormous flight of gulls issued from 
its horizon and cleared the fields of their pest. 
The spectacle of those sea-scavengers waddling 
through the brown stubble in pursuit of the 
grasshopper must have been diverting, at least, 
and the occurrence was doubtless miraculous 
if true. 



146 




VII. 
COLORADO. 

jHIS State is the apex of North Amer- 
ica, crown of the slopes that rise from 
Pacific and Atlantic shores. It is the 
heart of the Rocky Mountain chain, 
numbering hundreds of individual summits 
that rise to a height of more than 13,000 feet, 
and many whose altitude exceeds 14,000. Be- 
tween the ranges lie numerous parks, broad 
basins of great fertility and surpassing loveli- 
ness, diversified by forest, lake and stream, 
and themselves exalted to an altitude of from 
8,000 to 10,000 feet. The precipitous water- 
sheds of this titanic land give birth to many 
important rivers, such as the J^latte, Arkansas, 
Rio Grande del Norte and Grand, whose chan- 
nels, save where they occasionally loiter 
through the alluvial parks, are marked by fierce 
cataracts and gloomy gorges. 

The canons of the Grand River have not infrequently- 
been confounded with the Grand Canon of the Colo- 
rado River, by tourists who have not visited the latter, 
in consequence of an unfortunate coincidence of 
names, and further confusion has resulted from the 
use of the title "Grand Canon" in connection with 
the gorges of the Gunnison and the Arkansas. The 
Grand Canon of the Colorado River is entitled by 
divine right to a monopoly of the name. It is situated 
in Arizona, and was described in its place. 

147 







This Alpine land of prodigious scenery and 
inspiriting air, and of phenomenal mineral and 
agricultural wealth, we now enter upon the 
west. Every successive scene is an event, 
every turn of the way a revelation , advancing 
in ascending climaxes. 

From Grand Junction, at the confluence of 
the Grand and Gunnison rivers, to Colorado 
Springs the traveler may choose between the 
route of the Color.ado Midland direct and that 
of the Denver &^ Rio Grande via Pueblo. 
Three intermediate points are common to 
both, namely, Glenwood Springs, Leadville and 
Buena Vista, not to mention INIanitou, which is 
closely connected with Colorado Springs by a 
trolley line as well. Each route crosses the 
Continental Divide at a great altitude, and pre- 
sents a rapid succession of extraordinary 
scenes, in which valley, peak, gorge, cliff, 
meadow, forest, lake and torrent are com- 
bined and contrasted. 

148 





The Midland spec- 
ially offers Hagerman 
Pass, Seven Castles, 
Red Rock Canon, 
Granite Canon, and 
the consecutive chain ^''■'' ^"^ 

of Ute Pass resorts. The pre-eminent 
individual features of the Rw Grande 
are Tennessee and Marshall passes, 
the Caiion of the Grand River and 
the Royal Gorge of the Arkansas, 
all which, and man}^ more, are fully described 
in local publications easily obtainable. 

GLEN WOOD SPRINGS. 

Where the Grand River issues from somber 
caiion- walls into a mountain -hemmed valley, 
just above the confluence of the foaming tor- 
rent of Roaring Fork, numerous thermal 
springs of saline and chalybeate waters boil 
from its bed and from its grass-covered banks, 
and natural caves are filled with their vapor. 
Here is Glenwood Springs, lately the resort of 
Utes, and the home of deer, elk and bear; 
which latter have retreated only to the border- 
ing forest. Youngest of the great watering 
places of Colorado, its distinction lies in the 
extraordinary character and voluminous flow 
of the springs, the unique manner in which 
they have been brought into service, and the 
superb hotel, bath-house and park with which 
the natural attractiveness of the spot has been 
perfected. In the middle of the park the larg- 
est spring feeds an enormous pool, covering 
more than an acre, from three to five feet 
149 










deep, paved with smooth brick and walled with 
sandstone. A fountain of cold mountain-water 
in the center tempers the pool to gradations 
that radiate to its rims. Here bathing is in 
season throughout the year. In winter or 
summer the temperature of the water and of 
the immediate atmosphere has the same deli- 
cious warmth, and all the snow and ice that 
Colorado can boast in January at an altitude of 
over five thousand feet does not interfere 
with out-of-door bathing at Glen wood Springs. 
Catarrh, rheumatism, diseases of the blood, and 
many ailments that do not yield to medicine are 
either wholly cured or relieved by these waters. 
In the bath-house are private bath-rooms, 
with attendants and all manner of appliances, 
for those who prefer them, or to whom the 
public pool is unsuited. Radical treatment is 
given in the vapor-caves, which have been 
divided into compartments and fitted for the 
purpose. 

150 




The park-grounds rise in successive terraces 
to the Hotel Colorado, which was conceived in 
the same spirit of originality which created the 
improvements mentioned. This hotel is con- 
structed upon three sides of a large court con- 
taining a miniature lake, fed by cold mountain 
springs and stocked with trout intended for the 
table. In summer the glass partitions which 
in cold weather separate the main dining-room 
from the broad veranda are taken down, and 
tables are set in the open air ; and the guest 
who may fancy a broiled trout for breakfast is 
privileged to capture it himself, in this particu- 
lar following the practice of the patron of 
restaurants in Mexico, who selects the materials 
of his meal before they have been sent to the 
kitchen. 

The state of Colorado is the best hunting- 
ground left to the American sportsman. Not 
far distant from Glenwood Springs deer and 




152 



Ir^TT^^Wl 




154 



elk still abound, and bears and mountain-lions 
may easily be found by those who understand 
the manner of their pursuit. The Roaring 
Fork, a succession of noisy rapids and cataracts 
coursing down the timber-clad mountain-side, 
affords excellent trout-fishing, and Trappers 
Lake is known to thousands of gunners and 
fishermen, either by experience or by repute. 

LEADVILLE. 

Just beyond the foot of the Hagerman and 
Tennessee passes, upon the swell of a mountain 
flank, stands the great mining city, at an ele- 
vation of 10,000 feet. In April, i860, the first 
gold claims were staked out in California Gulch, 
and within three months thereafter 10,000 min- 
ers had located there. Two claims are said to 
have yielded $75,000 in the space of sixty days, 
and single individuals are known to have been 
rewarded by $100,000 for the work of one sum- 
mer. In a little more than a year the field was 
exhausted, nearly $10,000,000 of the yellow 
metal having been carried away. In the dig- 
ging of ditches to facilitate the washing of the 
auriferous gravel, masses of a heavy black rock 
were so commonly encountered as to prove a 
considerable annoyance, but they were thrown 
aside and forgotten. These were the famous 
silver carbonates, whose value was later re- 
vealed by a merely curious assay; and the first 
body of carbonate ore to be worked formed the 
entire mass of a cliff in California Gulch which 
had been execrated by innumerable gold-dig- 
gers. The richest ores were not among the 
first to be developed, and prospecting and 
155 



small workings were increasingly carried on 
for a series of years until, in 1878, two pros- 
pectors who were " grub-staked " by Mr. Tabor 
(since Senator), chanced to be crossing Fryer 
Hill and sat down to imbibe casual refreshment 
from a jug of whisky. By the time they had 
become satisfactorily refreshed all kinds of 
ground looked alike to them, and in pure imbe- 
cility, without the slightest justification, they 
began to dig where they had been sitting. 
They uncovered the ore body of the famous 
Little Pittsburg Mine, which, so exuberantly 
whimsical is occasional chance, has since 
proved to be the only point on the entire hill 
where the ledge approaches so near the sur- 
face. Then ensued a second scramble of the 
multitude for place in this marvelous treasure- 
region, and the wildest excitement reigned. In 
the eight years that have passed the carbonate 
ores have not been exhausted; on the contrary, 
new finds are still of frequent occurrence, and 
the city of Leadville is now known to be un- 
derlaid with bodies of that ore. But the car- 
bonate era has probably passed its climax and 
is giving place to the sulphide era, millions of 
tons of sulphide ores having already been 
blocked out in Iron, Breece and Carbonate 
hills. The geological position of the new ores 
promises even greater extent and value than 
the carbonates have realized, although they are 
less cheaply worked. And should the sul- 
156 




phides at length be exhausted no one can safely 
prophesy that this extraordinarily versatile 
locality will not present the world with some 
new compound which on analysis shall prove 
unexpectedly rich in precious metals. 

The carbonate discovery revived the almost- 
depopulated camp, and for the space of a few 
years thereafter Leadville was nearly as no- 
torious for lawlessness and personal insecurity 




as for the richness and number of its mines. 
That phase has been outlived; order, quiet 
and the refinements that belong to a wealthy 
city in our day having long been permanently 
established. The tourist will, however, find it 
distinctly individual and full of present interest, 
and the wonderful romance of its past, which 
reads like a tale of unbridled imagination, 
invests it with an imperishable glamour. 



BUENA VISTA. 



Stretching southward for thirty miles be- 
tween the Park and Saguache ranges, at an 
157 



equal distance east from Leadville, lies an 
idyllic valley of the Arkansas River. At the 
head of this valley stands Buena Vista, like a 
Swiss village. Harvard, Yale and Princeton 
mountains, each loftier than Pike's Peak, rise 
close behind it upon the west, and upon the 
south the white summits of the Sangre de Cristo 
range are discernible. The view is downward 
upon the white town and over the far stretch 




of sunlit meadow, whose penetrating beauty 
and perfect peace is enhanced by the grandeur 
of the College Peaks, which from the grass- 
grown and timbered slopes of their feet rise to 
heights and forms of awful sublimity. Buena 
Vista means in the Spanish a comprehensive 
outlook rather than a beautiful scene. It is a 
euphonious name, and serves well enough in 
Colorado, where among so much that is super- 
lative one learns to be temperate in the use of 
adjectives; but anywhere else in the world this 
should have been Vista Gloriosa. It is a peep 
of paradise, a dream of a happy vale where the 
blessed might dwell in joy forever. 
158 



CRIPPLE CREEK. 

Four years ago the famous gold camp was 
reached only by stage coach at the heels of half 
a dozen spirited horses driven by a veteran who 
reeked of border reminiscence. Two railroads 
now transport its passengers and freight, the 
Midland Terminal on the north, and the 
Florence &^ Cripple Creek on the south. Its 




history is pretty well known. Twice it has 
been a more than national sensation, and twice 
the wave of general excitement has subsided 
and the greater part of the gathered throng of 
fevered gold-seekers, disappointed in its hope 
of acquiring immediate and unmerited riches, 
has melted away with anathema upon its lips. 
When the first wave receded perhaps five out 
of twelve or fifteen thousand remained clustered 
around a few mines of enormous determined 
value and a goodly number of promising claims, 
among half a dozen small and fragile settle- 
ments which wore the motley aspect peculiar to 
young mining towns. During the second in- 
flux, Avhen the population numbered twenty-five 
or thirty thousand, the camps were transformed 
159 








1 60 




into modernized cities, with water-works, elec- 
tric lights and good hotels. Yet even when 
houses in great number were building daily, 
men with hundreds of dollars in their pockets 
rented chairs for a night, instead of beds and 
rooms, and when chairs were no longer to be 
had they walked the streets or slept in alleys 
because money couldnot buy any better accom- 
modation. At the pitch of exciteroent'the town 
of Cripple Creek, center of operations, was vis- 
ited by a devastating conflagration. Before the 
smoke had cleared new and better buildings 
were under way, but the disaster undoubtedly 
hastened the inevitable hour when so dispro- 
portionate a population must adjust itself to its 
single wealth-creating industry of mining and 
shipping ore. For in that vast multitude com- 
paratively few had an indubitable prize, many 
owners of encouraging prospects had developed 
them to the limit of their own resources, and 
the time came when the outside speculating 
world wearied of contributing money for shares 
i6i 




in prospective mines which failed to give satis- 
factory account of themselves, if, in truth, they 
were not in some instances purely mythical. In 
any event the grist which had fed this sensa- 
tional mill ceased to arrive, and thousands who 
had directly or indirectly subsisted upon it were 
compelled to withdraw. So for the second time 
Cripple Creek relapsed into the comparative 
quiet of operating its mines and developing its 



\ 







- '>:- -^ ^"-^ 



best prospects. It was aliiiost unavoidable that 
it should lose something of good repute in cer- 
tain quarters. Where many wagers are lost, 
however foolish, good will is apt to be lacking; 
and the satirist of human follies may well turn a 
cynical eye upon the most prodigious gambling- 
spot of America in our generation. But after 
the disappointed or deluded have had their say, 
and the moralist has eased him of his epigram, 
let us in justice add that Cripple Creek covers 
one of the richest gold deposits known to the 
world. At the end of June, 1S97, it had milled 
a total of about $28,000,000 in gold, not to 
speak of the dumps which contain uncounted 
162 



tons of low-grade ore awaiting the introduction 
of methods which shall reduce them cheaply 
and upon a large scale. The actual output for 
the first six months of 1S97 was $6,000,000. 

MANITOU. 

In the immediate neighborhood of Pike's 
Peak is found an extraordinary group of resorts 
which every year, between June and Septem- 
ber, attracts unnumbered thousands of visitors. 
Each differs in individual allurements, but all 
alike are characterized by transparent, exhilara- 
ting air, vivid tones of verdure and myriad 
flowers, streams, waterfalls, small lakes, foun- 
tains, forests, red rock-sculptures, gorges and 
mountains, always mountains, leading the eye 
progressively to their kingly peak; by white 
tents in the shade of pines and aspens, neat 
hamlets and esthetic caravansaries hugging 
Cyclopean walls; by fashionable equipages, 
equestrians and an animated holiday throng on 
foot ; and by a buoyant breadth which all the 
multitude can not crowd or oppress. The cul- 
minating point is Manitou, a spot of such 
supernal beauty that even the Utes rose to the 
height of poetic appreciation and named it after 
the Great Spirit. Placed at the very foot of the 
terrible Peak, in the opening of the mountain- 
notch upon the broad plains, every essence 
of interior landscape loveliness is showered 
upon it. It is without a flaw, a superlative 
thing unpicturable to those who know only the 
plains or the shores of the sea; a Titania's 
bower of melting sweetness amid Nature's 
savagest throes. Marvels are thickly clustered. 
163 




There are grottoes hung with stalactites and 
banked with moss-like beds of gleaming crys- 
tal-filaments, springs tinctured wnth iron, 
springs effervescent with soda, plains serried 
with huge isolated rock-sculptures, narrow 
gorges where at the bottom of hundreds of feet 
of shadow is scant passage-way, long perpen- 
dicular lines of white foaming torrent, and 
soft blending flames of color from rosy rock 
and herbage and flower. 

The waters of the Soda Springs are walled in 
the middle of a dainty park in the heart of the 
village, at night an incandescent lamp gleam- 
ing upward through their bubbling depths. 
Millions of gallons are exported, but something 
of the living sparkle on the tongue is lost in 
separation from the surcharged fount. Here it 
is more exuberantly crisp and refreshing than 
that of the artificial compound which, in East- 
ern cities, presides over the counter dearest to 
the feminine heart. The flow is unstinted, and 
is free to all. The Iron Springs are upon the 
hillside, within easy strolling distance. Both 
are distinctly beneficial to health, and are fre- 
quented by a merry multitude throughout the 
day and early night. 

Grand Caverns and the Cave of the Winds 
are near neighbors, divided by a single ridge 
and doubtless intercommunicating by undis- 
covered passages. Both are elevated far 
above the town; the approach to the one 
climbing past the Rainbow Falls along a 
steep slope that looks off across the entrancing 
landscape of the valley to the mountain back- 
ground, the other opening in the side of 
164 




Williams Canon, through the notch of whose 
magnificent npreaching walls there is at one 
point a sharp turn where an unskillful driver 
could hardly hope to pass without grazing a 
wheel. It must have been a critical place in 
the old days when stages were " held up,'" for 
the miscalculation of an inch would have 
meant catastrophe in the wake of plunging- 
horses. The two caves are very similar — nar- 
row underground corridors opening into a 
series of high-vaulted chambers hung with 
stalactites and glittering in magnesium light 
like the jewel-caves of the Arabian Nights. 
The floors are dry, but through the limestone 
walls fine moisture oozes, depositing the sta- 
lagmite in strange and often esthetic forms, in 
addition to the pendent icicles of rock. There 
are striking suggestions of intelligible statuary-, 
and innumerable imitations of natural objects, 
animal and vegetable. There is the Grand 
Organ, really a natural xylophone, a cluster of 
stalactites of varying proportions, upon which 
entire tunes are played with approximate 
accuracy, with occasional tones that are as 
mournfully impressive as a midnight-bell. 
Jewel Casket, Concert Hall, Bridal Chamber 
and the like are names bestowed upon different 
compartments, and numberless particular for- 
mations have individual titles. Grand 
Caverns and the Cave of the Winds 
each requires at least an hour for the 
most casual exploration. Thousands 
of visiting-cards have been left uj^on 
the walls. 

1 66 



yi^ 



A park of 500 acres covered with prcjtruding 
rock-figures of striking form and beauty consti- 
tutes the Garden of the Gods. The names ap- 
pHed to these suggestive forms of sandstone 
and gypsum describe their eccentric appear- 
ance. Toadstools. Mushroom Park, Hedgehog, 
Ant Eater, Lizard, Turtle, Elephant, Lion, 
Camels, American Eagle, Seal and Bear, 
Sphinx, Siamese Twins, Flying Dutchman, 
Irish Washerwoman, Punch, Judy and Baby, 
Lady of the Garden, Three Graces, Stage 
Coach and Graveyard are a few. There are 
others which rise to the dignity of pure gran- 
deur. Pictures of the Gateway, a magnificent 
portal 330 feet high, and of Cathedral Spires 
and Balanced Rock have been admired all over 
the world. Here, as elsewhere in the AVest, 
beyond the eastern bounds of Colorado and 
New Mexico, color is an element of charm in 
landscape even greater than contour. These 
rocks are white and yellow and red, and in the 
crystalline air, that scorns a particle of haze, 
the scene is indescribably clear and sharp to 
the eye, and as vivid as an enthusiastic water- 
color. Drawings in black-and-white inade- 
quately communicate them to a reader. 

Contiguous to the Garden of the Gods lies 
Glen Ej'rie, the private estate of General 
Palmer, covering 1,300 acres. This is open to 
the public except on Sunday. Queen Cafion, 
fourteen miles long, the Major Domo, cliffs of 
blazing color, and tree-embowered drives and 
green-houses are attractive features of Glen 
Evrie. 

167 . ^^ 





ASCKNT OK I^IKE S i'EAK. 

The majesty of the Rocky Mountains can n(jt 
be beckoned wholly into intimacy. There is a 
quality that holds unbendingly aloof from fel- 
lowship, if not from perfect comprehension. 
The sea is sympathetic in moods. Soul-quaking 
in tumult, it softens to moments of superficial 
loveliness that would have you forget the mur- 
derous hunger that lies the length of your stat- 
ure under wave. Not so the mountain-peaks. 
They are the sublimest personalities known to 
earth; the hugeous, towering imperturbable. 
They joy not, lament not, rage not. The chill 
feolian of upper air and the roar of distant 
avalanche do not stir the profundity of their 
rapt contemplation. Pale, austere, passionless, 
and ineffable in grandeur, they rise like an 
apotheosis of intellect over the spheres of emo- 
tion; or, if you like better, they stand for 
lofty spiritual reach. It augurs well of man 
that he can endure their proximity. A nation 
of mountaineers should be unequaled in the 
168 



qualities of virtue, intrepidity, and clarity of 
brain. The legend of William Tell is a true 
expression of the spirit of the people of Swit- 
zerland, that brooks no fetter of tyranny. And 
you will fear, not love, the mountains if you 
have not heights within to match them. So 
every genuine lover of a topmost pinnacle 
should have something sterling in him. From 
the knot of excursionists you will see him steal 
away to be alone in the solemn exaltation of 
the hour. 

There are many summits in Colorado more 
elevated than Pike's Peak, but they are difficult, 
and the difference in height is not appreciable. 
Here you are lifted above the clouds so far that 
the world lies remote beneath the eye, the 
neighboring towns and cities shrunk to insignifi- 
cance. Vast is the panorama outspread to view. 
The plain is grown indefinite and unsubstantial, 
like a subdued picture floating in the sky; but 
beyond the ranges are piled tier on tier, peak 
after peak, white-draped or dun in a haze of 
blue. The storm sweeps below, its forked 
lightnings under foot, its rumble of thunder 
echoing faintly up through the thin cold air; 
and while boisterous deluge rolls over valley 
and plain you stand bathed in radiance, like 
Phoebus in his chariot of morn. And there is 
an hour of incommunicable splendor, when the 
sun rises, gleaming like a burnished yellow moon 
through dark cloud-wrappings on the rim of 
169 








fading night, and again when it sinks behind 
the fierce tumbled mountain-chain, gilding the 
peaks with ruddy fire, the while dusk spreads 
beneath like a silent submerging sea. 

The ascent, for very many years, was oftener 
talked of than attempted. Zebulon Pike him- 
self failed, in 1806, and half a century passed 
after that before the first trail was cut, from 
old Summit Park, a dozen miles west of Mani- 
tou. That trail was little used, because of its 
difficulties and dangers. In the seventies 
three additional trails were constructed, and in 
1S89 the carriage-road from Cascade was com- 
pleted. In 1 89 1 the Cog-Wheel Railway began 
operation, running directly from Manitou to 
the summit, and accomplishing that feat in a 
distance of nine miles. The steepest grade on 
the road is one foot in four. It starts near the 
Iron Springs, at the mouth of Engelmann's 
Caiion, and makes the round trip in four and a 
half hours, allowing a stop of forty minutes on 
the peak. Several trains are run daily, in the 
open season, and, moreover, accommodations 
for the night can be had in the old Signal 
Station, which has been made over into a 
tavern. To those who desire to obtain this 
crowning experience in the easiest manner and 
in the shortest possible time, the ascent by rail 
is recommended. Many, however, prefer the 
greater personal freedom and the fuller enjoy- 
170 



ment of scenes by the way offered by the 
carriage road from Cascade. Although that is 
sixteen miles long, it has ample rewards for all 
its fatigues. 

The altitude of Pike's Peak is 14,147 feet 
above sea-level, and its height above the start- 
ing-point of the Cog- Wheel Railway in Mani- 
tou is 7.518 feet. The altitude of Mount Wash- 
ington, in New Hampshire, is 6,293 feet, that 
oftheRigi, in Switzerland, 5,832 feet, and of 
the Jungfrau, 13,667 feet, above the sea. 

COLORADO SPRINGS. 

Closely backed by the Rockies, whose east- 
ern contour is a protecting semicircle that 
opens to the Great Plains, this pretty city stands 
upon a level floor, divided by broad tree-shaded 
avenues into squares as regular as those of a 
chess-board, which it strongly resembles when 
viewed from the slopes and pinnacle of Pike's 
Peak. There are attractive drives in every 
direction, out upon the plains, through the 
canons and up the mountain-sides. Only six 
miles distant from Manitou, with which it is 
connected by an electric street-railway, in 
addition to the steam railroads, and joined to 
Chevenne Canons upon the other hand, Colo- 
rado Springs is perhaps the most fashionable 
and most populous of the special resorts of 
Colorado. It is a city of homes of the wealthy, 
with some 12,000 inhabitants. 

The street-line ends at the foot of the cailon, 
whose approach lies between a swelling grass- 
covered rise upon the one hand and a shrubby 
hillside upon the other. Here begins a com- 
171 






WJ 



fortable carriage-road, and conveyances and 
burros are procurable. The road gradually 
ascends through groves of evergreen and de- 
ciduous trees, crossing and recrossing a clear 
mountain -stream by rustic bridges, on through 
the gateway of the Pillars of Hercules into a 
defile where rock-walls rise many hundred 
feet overhead, and needles, spires, cones and 
irregular crags lift head above and behind 
one another, some bleakly bare, some fringed 
with shrubs and trees, prodigious rocks serry- 
ing the mountain-side to heights where details 
of form are lost to the eye and only broad 
effects of color and ebb and swell are intel- 
ligible. The carriage-road leads directly to the 
foot of Seven Falls, to whose head the visitor 
may climb by a long stairway. A short dis- 
tance below the falls a circuitous narrow trail 
diverges toward the left from the carriage-road, 
lip which burros are ridden to the upper level, 
where one can look down upon this entire 
series of brilliant cascades. Arrived here many 
diverging paths invite the visitor. The log 
cabin where Helen Hunt Jackson loved to 
spend much of her time in summer is at hand, 
and the former site of her grave, marked by a 
huge heap of stones, may be reached by a steej) 
path to the left. Glens and rocky eminences, 
bushy retreats by the side of the streams, and 
fern and flower-decked banks entice to farther 
exploration. Day after day many return to the 
fresh beauties of the spot, each tim« discover- 
ing some new delight among the thousand 
charms of the mountain-wilds. 
172 




DENVER. 

Denver lies 75 miles north from Colorado 
Springs, and 115 from Pueblo. It is a queen 
among fair cities, standing upon a broad ele- 
vated plain, with mountain horizons of great 
beauty. Its enormous smelters, with towering, 
smoke-vomiting stacks, do not seriously deface 
it, and themselves are an interesting and instruc- 
tive sight, for many millions of gold and silver 
are there extracted from Rocky Mountain ores 
every year. 

The Queen City of the Plains has periods of 
winter cold and snow, but commonly the air is 
delightfully temperate when Eastern cities are 
ice-bound and shivering. Almost every part 
of Denver can be quickly visited by electric or 
cable street cars. 




173 




VIII. 
HOMEWARD. 

PCJRTY miles below Colorado Springs, 
in the Arkansas Valley, thirty miles 
east from the mountains, stands Pu- 
eblo, another cit}- of smelters, and of 
immense steel, iron and copper works. Here 
is the Colorado Mineral Palace, a large and 
costly auditorium of modernized Egyptian arch- 
itecture, whose domes are supported by gilded 
columns, arovmd whose bases are arranged 
plate-glass cases filled with choice specimens of 
Colorado minerals, which constitute the most 
valuable collection of minerals in the world. 

The region traversed by the Arkansas River, 
in its course through eastern Colorado and 
western Kansas, exemplifies the benefits of 
Avater artificially applied to growing crops; 
and many thrifty settlements greet the eye at 
frequent intervals. 

Sixty miles east of Pueblo one comes again 
to La Junta, the junction point in southeastern 
Colorado which was passed on the outward 
journey. From this point to Chicago the scenes 
would be familiar except for the fact that many 
localities which on the outward trip were 
passed in the night are now seen by day. 
1/4 



*# 



The marvels of the West, however, have now 
been left behind, and the tourist may be ex- 
pected to be absorbed in pleasurable anticipa- 
tion of his home-coming. He returns not as he 
departed, for such a journey as that which now 
draws near its close possesses an emphatic edu- 
cating value. He knows definitely now about 
those features of our Western empire which 
before were to him a vague imagining, inade- 
quately and perhaps wrongly conceived. 

And, not the least valuable of human acqui- 
sitions, henceforward he will have a storv- 



ATCH«>:rjM,^t 



IRiMI 





LBAp'15 



